What 17,000 Wallets Teaches Us About Honesty
Across 4,000 years and 40 countries, people keep doing the same thing with a stranger's wallet. Someone wrote that into us.
I found a man’s wallet on a concrete pier by the cruise ship in Greece last year.
Thick, brown, stuffed with cash, passport, driver’s license, credit cards. The works.
I rushed up the gangway and handed it in to the guest services desk. The clerk’s eyebrows arched in surprise as I handed it to her. She thanked me and said it was very nice of me to return it.
I said, “Sure. That’s what people do.”
Why?
Today’s article deep dives into what drives man to be honest and where it comes from.
What A Study That Dropped 17,000 Wallets Found Out…
A study conducted by the University of Michigan and the University of Zurich provides provocative clues about honesty and wallets.
Researchers spent three years dropping 17,000 wallets across 335 cities in 40 countries. Some wallets were empty. Others had $13. Some had almost $100.
Every economist in the study said that the more money in the wallet, the fewer people would return it.
Wrong.
In 38 of 40 countries, people were more likely to return wallets containing money than wallets without money. At $13, 61 percent of finders contacted the owner. At $100, that number spiked to 72 percent.
What’s going on here?
One researcher concluded: people didn’t want to see themselves as thieves.
Why?
The same instinct pops up across cultures and centuries that share little. Not language, geography, religion, or history.
C.S. Lewis Noticed This Pattern Before Anyone Ran Studies
C.S. Lewis wrote about man’s tendency to act morally decades before anyone was dropping wallets in field experiments.
Lewis declares in Mere Christianity that every civilization that has ever existed has had a moral law. Not identical rules, but the same structure underneath.
Some things are right.
Some things are wrong.
And people seem to know which is which before anyone teaches them formally.
He then asks where that comes from.
Evolution is the first candidate. But evolution selects for survival and reproduction. This is based on self-interest. The genes that spread are the ones that help the organism compete.
A moral code that tells you to return a stranger’s wallet — at no benefit to yourself — doesn’t obviously follow from that.
Evolution can explain cooperation within a group. It struggles with the impulse to reach out to strangers in 40 countries who will never see you again.
Social conditioning is the second candidate. We learn what’s right from the people around us. That’s clearly true.
But Lewis points out that the same basic structure shows up in societies that never contacted each other, separated by oceans, centuries, and language. You can’t condition people with a rule they never received.
So what’s left?
Lewis thought something was writing that law directly into people. Not through parents, priests, or culture. Prior to all of that.
I think he’s right about that part.
Cicero Said the Same in 44 BC Before Christ
Cicero noticed something like Lewis’s Law of Human Nature, without the Christian framing. In 44 BC — the year Caesar was killed — he penned De Officiis, a book on moral duty addressed to his son.
He wrote it from exile. The Republic he’d spent his life defending was coming apart. Caesar was dead, and the men fighting over the wreckage weren’t returning anything to anyone. Which makes it stranger and more interesting that he sat down to write about why you should.
He argued that taking someone else’s property violates what he called the law of human fellowship. Not Roman law. Not the Senate’s decree. Something beneath all of that.
A moral code.
Roman law eventually caught up to the instinct. If you found property and knew whose it was, keeping it was theft. The law didn’t invent that principle. It recognized one that the Roman Republic society already knew in its bones.
Cicero would have understood the arched brows at customer service in Greece. He might have said her surprise was the interesting part — not the returning of the wallet, but the expectation that someone wouldn’t.
Cicero spent his career arguing that the morally right choice and the truly useful choice are ultimately the same thing. Returning the wallet costs you nothing. Not returning it costs the other person everything.
Something in Us Already Knows
The woman at the desk was surprised when I handed her a wallet stuffed with cash. She shouldn’t have been.
The study shows that most people do what I did. They returned the wallet. Not because someone told them to. Not because they calculated the reward. Because something in them already knew what to do with another person’s passport and money.
The moral code in all of us showed up on a concrete pier in Greece, in a thick brown wallet sitting in the sun.
Thank you for reading. Did you learn anything new?
If so, subscribe to learn more weekly about how history never repeats itself, but man always does.
It’s the right thing to do. If you find say, $100 and no one is actively looking for it, it’s yours. Also yes if it has a Id absolutely return it. I’ve found wallets and had mine returned so I understand.
Would you always return the wallet? I would. Just too strong an urge to do the right thing in that situation.