Study Ranks Global Honesty: Switzerland Tops, Morocco Among Lowest

A team of researchers conducted a field study on the degree of honesty of humans. It was a question of testing the civic-mindedness of thousands of people. The researchers deliberately left wallets, filled or not, in 355 cities in 40 countries. They "lost" more than 17,000 wallets containing different sums of money: between $13.45 and $100 with the local currency of each country. A key, a shopping list, and business cards indicating the owner’s name and email address were in the wallets.

"We used fictitious but common male names in each country. The shopping list and business cards were all written in the local language to indicate that the person is a resident of the country," say the authors of the study. The results show unexpected honesty. "In almost all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets containing the most money," note the researchers. On average, 72% of wallets containing enough money were returned, compared to 51% of those containing less money.

The Swiss and Scandinavians are the most honest, the study reveals. China, Guatemala and Morocco are at the bottom of the pack. Other results: the proportion of wallets returned exceeded 70% in Norway and Switzerland, while in China, less than 10% of employees did so for an empty wallet, and more than 20% when there were yuan.