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  • a few weeks ago

  • I lost my wallet which made me sad because it is a pain to get everything replaced

  • Then I thought, what kind of person doesn't return a wallet

  • And then I thought I'm a firm believer in the scientific method,

  • I should test some hypothoses.

  • So I got 200 identical wallets in order to drop them in each of the 20 cities you see here the goal being not

  • Only to see which cities were the most and least honest, but to ask

  • questions of anyone who called in to see if I could pick out some patterns among the honest ones and I wanted to make the

  • Wallets look as real as possible so in each of them

  • I put a fake ID with no picture so as not to bias people six American dollars and 200 Filipino dollars

  • This is a way to make it look like a lot of money when in reality this is only worth 4 bucks

  • Then I put in an ultrasound picture and on the back we hand wrote a date from four years ago

  • And then this adorable picture of a puppy I found on reddit. The goal was in addition to the ID and the money I wanted

  • To make a look like the wallet had sentimental value to the owner.

  • I was trying to remove any excuse for someone not to return the wallet such as it looked fake

  • Or it wouldn't be worth hassle

  • If there was only 2 bucks inside of a blank wallet. So in our case if they didn't return it

  • It would only be because they weren't being honest. Then we had a fake loyalty card and a random business card

  • And then critically a card that looked like he came with the wallet

  • That said if found please call and then we wrote the phone number.

  • And then because it's impractical for me to actually visit 20 cities

  • I went on the Instagram page from a YouTube channel to ask for help and right away the response was awesome. Once I'd selected my

  • 20 helpers I sent them instructions and shipped them each 10 wallets and then last Monday all across, North America

  • operation wallet drop commenced.

  • (music)

  • I asked them after they dropped the wallets to try and get some secret footage if

  • Possible and to do that they came up with some pretty clever methods.

  • I'm actually gonna tuck the wallet underneath my car so I Drive away it stays in the parking lot

  • Almost immediately calls started pouring in from all of the cities so when people call in we ask them eight

  • Questions such as if they were religious or not or if there was still money in the wallet when they found it and if so

  • Of course we told them just keep it. So after three days of collecting data:

  • Here's what we found for starters and this blew my mind two-thirds of the wallets were returned and of those that were returned

  • 96 percent still had the money inside. The average age of one of the caller's was

  • 36 which is almost exactly the average age of a person in the U.S.

  • So how old you are it doesn't seem to affect honesty.

  • There's a pretty big disparity in which cities were the most and least honest

  • and I'll get to the rankings in just a minute.

  • But first I wanted to test a

  • hypothesis that a person without a lot of money in considered poor would be less likely to return the wallet than someone who had a

  • lot of money. And to do this I looked at publicly available census data and found the zip codes with the highest and lowest

  • medium income then I instructed my friends helping in each city to randomly drop half the wallets in the high-income area of the city and

  • then the other half in the low-income area. In each while it was marked with a unique number on the back of this card

  • so we knew exactly which city and location if somebody called it in. And when we tallied it up:

  • 60 wallets were called in from the high-income areas and

  • exactly 60 wallets were also returned from the low-income areas which I thought was pretty cool. So a rich person is no more likely to return

  • A wallet than someone in the lowest income bracket who could probably use the money.

  • In fact: we had one person calling who is homeless, two people calling who are living in shelters, and a fourth person who is a

  • panhandler. All four of them had full wallets. Another question

  • I wanted a test was if women were more honest than men it turns out a majority of the wallets were returned by men but

  • Think about it that doesn't necessarily mean. They are more honest because maybe the locations they were dropped

  • There's typically more men like in front of a sports bar or a hardware store so to control for this

  • I had all my helping friends in each city dropped two of the ten wallets in a men's restroom

  • And then two in a women's bathroom

  • This way we could control the gender of the wallet finder once again this came up nearly identical

  • with 23 wallets returned for men versus

  • 24 for women so gender doesn't seem to play a role in a person's honesty either

  • And I should mention here one of the questions

  • We asked the caller's was if they thought the wallet looked fake

  • or

  • Suspicious at all and only a very small minority did so this confirms that for those who didn't call it was likely because they were

  • Dishonest and not because they thought it wasn't a real person's wallet another thing we tested was small town versus big city

  • So you notice four of the cities you've probably never heard of before that's because they have populations of around a thousand people

  • whereas the rest were the largest cities in North America and here we did see a

  • Significant difference in the small towns the average rate of return was eight wallets whereas in the big cities

  • It was six

  • And I think this sort of makes sense to me because small towns tend to foster a sense of community

  • Where everyone knows everyone versus the anonymity of a big city and now for a rundown of all the cities?

  • I'll break them into three categories starting with the least honest

  • We've got Detroit with three wallets returned and New York City with four I was really rooting for Detroit and hoping they would just surprise

  • Everyone but looks like maybe they're still in the process of their rebuilding efforts then for the middle of the pack at five wallets return

  • We've got Seattle, Los Angeles Miami Dallas and Edmonton and at six well. It's return

  • We've got Huntsville, Alabama and New London Connecticut, which is one of our small towns next at seven wallets

  • We've got San Francisco, Winnipeg and Washington DC

  • The final category is the Honest Abe cities with Parma, Idaho and Las Vegas at eight wallets

  • And I should mention for Vegas instead of high-income and low-income we put half on the strip and then half in the suburbs and for

  • What it's worth all five dropped on the strip were returned and then at a remarkable nine wallets return

  • We've got two more small cities with Nashua, Idaho and Hill City, South Dakota and then Portland

  • Oregon Macon Fred and Carrie proud and finally there were two cities with an astounding

  • 100% return rate vote for big cities with Chicago which I didn't see coming

  • And then Salt Lake City and before he just shot, Salt Lake City up to those gosh darn super nice Mormons

  • It's like of the eight people wearable the interview only three said they were religious and only one

  • Attended church in fact about 40% of the people who turn in wallet said they were not religious

  • And this is close enough to the average for a large city that

  • it's fair to say that whether or not a person was religious seem to have no outcome on their honesty according to our data and

  • I should also mention that while our two Canadian cities finished right in the middle of the pack my Canadian friend saw this on his

  • Facebook page right after dropping his wallets and going the extra mile with a

  • Blanket Facebook post to find a random wallet owner is just about the most Canadian thing ever

  • He also dropped ten wallets in Disneyland, and we were hoping to get a large number back

  • But we only got four calls from individuals

  • and then too from

  • Security who were super confused when they had identical wallets turned in at which point they made it very clear

  • They would not be calling us back if more wallets came in because they hate science so we had a third Disney Line now as

  • A data point because we just don't know how many got turned into security

  • So those were the findings

  • And I'd say from all this I learned two things

  • The first is that it's a really good idea to put your phone number somewhere in your wall

  • That's probably one of the reasons we have such a high rate of return also

  • I found out if you find a wallet you can drop it in any u.s.

  • Post office box, and then we return it to the address found on the driver's license free of charge

  • I tested this out and it totally works and the second thing is that in general

  • People are way more honest than I originally thought having just lost my wallet

  • I was anticipating a return rate of maybe 20%

  • so to get two out of every three wallets back blew my mind in one city a

  • Convenience order loved what we were doing so she kept putting the wallet back in the bathroom received someone would steal it and after six

  • Times of somebody bringing the wallet back with all of the money inside she gave up trying

  • Lately it seems like so much of what you see online is meant to stoke

  • Outrage at some group of people versus ourselves because that's what gets shared and that begins to warp our

  • Perspectives that the only good people out there are those within our own group

  • but this cold hard data shows that across any age or gender or

  • socio-economic background

  • cross the whole religious spectrum through middle of

  • America and along the coast there are lots of good people everywhere and not only that but they constitute a majority

  • these people didn't call it for some reward or

  • Facebook lights or because they knew someone was watching they did it because it was simply the right thing to do and I think that's

  • Pretty cool and something worth remembering

  • The science in this video was brought to you by my longtime friends at audible summer is coming which means between long road trips hitting

  • the gym or working in the yard you can make

  • Previously boring stretches of time something you actually look forward to by listening to audiobooks and to test that out for free you can go

  • To audible.com slash mark Rober or simply text mark over to 500 500 in fact while doing my wallet Steakhouse for this video

  • I was listening to astrophysics for people in a hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

  • Besides energy in

  • 1904 the even with my background in space I learned a ton about the universe

  • And how we came to discover it

  • It's written for people who don't have PhDs in astrophysics, but I've genuinely curious minds about the amazing universe all around us

  • And if you download it and for some crazy reason you don't like it, audible will let you swap it out for something else no

  • Questions asked. So if you want to make your brain bigger by listening to this book or any other book for free again go to

  • Audible.com slash Mark Rover or simply text Mark Rover to 500 500. Thanks for watching

a few weeks ago

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