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You must read this article. I have to tell you I was pleasantly surprised by some of the results of Readers Digests little game. Pretty interesting.

READER'S DIGEST

FINDERS KEEPERS

Walking along, minding your own business, you see a billfold on the ground. You pick it up. Some photos inside, a card or two with ID. Hmm, and a nice wad of bills too. So what do you do? The right thing, or …?

Well, Reader's Digest set out to discover just what people would do. First in big cities and small towns around the United States, and then in Europe, Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America, editors of the magazine dropped temptation in the path of unsuspecting people. We "lost" more than 1100 wallets to see just how many would be returned. Each contained up to $50 in local currency, but also a name and phone number so that the finder would have no trouble returning the billfold-presuming the finder wanted to return it. We left the wallets on sidewalks and in phone booths, in front of office buildings, discount stores and churches, in parking lots and restaurants. Then we sat back and watched.

The results were … fascinating.

All told, 44 percent of the wallets were taken up, never to be seen again. From one country to another, though, the results varied widely. The gold stars for honesty have to go to Norway and Denmark, where every single wallet was returned. (Do they even bother to lock doors there?) Scandinavian countries, on the whole, put the rest of the world to shame. As did New Zealand and a couple of places in Asia-South Korea and Japan. But watch your stuff in Argentina and Italy. And as for Mexico-well, tough luck if you lose your wallet there. In most Mexican cities, barely any billfolds were returned.

How did the United States fare? Not bad: almost seven out of every ten wallets were returned. That put us solidly on the list of pretty-honest countries, alongside Canada, Australia and India.

Of course, cities and towns within the same country often varied widely as well. (One quick tip: relax in Seattle but keep an eye out in Atlanta.)

So what does all this say about human character? Plenty-at least when it comes to those who wore halos. In each place, we talked with people to find out why they returned our wallets. Throughout the world, across diverse cultures, it boiled down to a few common themes:

They Learned It at Home

Took the High Road
Norway	100%

Singapore	90

Australia	70

Japan	70

U.S.	67

U.K.	65

France	60

In Weimar, Germany, some of the residents weren't exactly paragons of virtue: eight of the ten wallets we dropped there simply disappeared. One of those returned, though, was spotted by eight-year-old Jacqueline Geier while she was riding her bike. After pointing out her find to her mother, Ingrid, the two of them quickly decided it was not theirs to keep. "When I grew up, times were rough and we needed every pfennig," Ingrid said. "But my parents were very honest, and I've tried to bring up my three children the same way."

Mary, a little girl in a pink floral dress, found a wallet on a bench in a Seattle amusement park. She ran to her father, Yong Cha, who immediately handed it back to her. "You must take this to someone who can help find the owner," he said. The nine-year-old took her dad's hand and they went off to find the park office. "Honesty is the most important thing a child can learn," Cha said.

So if the power of example is important, what do we make of these others? In the chic resort town of Lausanne, Switzerland, a smartly dressed woman in a cape and stiletto heels was walking hand in hand with her daughter. The woman stooped to grab our wallet. With the young girl looking on silently, she pocketed the find. We never heard from her.

Another wallet was spotted by a boy out shopping with his mother and sister in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Mom quickly stuffed the wallet into her baggy pants, grabbed both children and hurried to catch a bus. And then there was the woman who pulled her car up short of the entrance to Fulham Palace, once the residence of the Bishops of London. Her son jumped out and snatched the wallet. Back in the car, the woman picked through it carefully before driving through the palace gates. She never got in touch either.

Matters of Faith

Zulhijah Binti Sahar, a 20-year-old woman running a fruit stall in Kajang, Malaysia, wasn't exactly getting rich, but she didn't waver for a minute. "Being a Muslim, I'm aware of temptation and how to overcome it," she said.

Like Sahar, many who handed back our billfolds cited their religious beliefs. In the lobby of Taipei's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, we left a wallet on top of a pay phone. H. C. Chiu found it, and promptly took it to the reception desk. "It is my duty to do good work," said Chiu, a devout Buddhist.

Lena Kruchinina, a governess in the Russian city of Vladimir, heeded one of the Ten Commandments after she found a wallet on the floor of a drugstore. As she handed it to the pharmacist, she told us: "Several years ago I could have taken it, but now I am completely changed. As they say, 'Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor's.'"

Which isn't to say that sticky-fingered people are necessarily godless. In Mexico, at least two apparently devout Christians who kept our wallets made the sign of the cross after picking them up and peeking inside. The cash, they must have decided, was heaven-sent.

It Could Happen to You

Hit the Highway
Holland	50%

Germany	45

Russia	43

Philippines	40

Italy	35

China	30

Mexico	21

Time and again, the world over, those who looked like they could use $50 often turned it in, while many people who appeared affluent enough took the money and ran. Consider Frasher Hajzeraj, an Albanian who fled the fighting in Kosovo and was working as a restaurant waiter in Switzerland. After handing in our wallet, he said, "I put in long hours and I know how hard one must work to earn that much."

Indeed, survivors of tough times seemed to respond most often with empathy, and a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God honesty. When she found a wallet, for instance, Shannon Hill was a college student in Greensboro, N.C., working three jobs to pay for tuition, food and rent. Her first thought: "I could sure use this money." But then she saw a picture of a baby in the wallet, and changed her tune. Somebody else needed it more.

Several of those who returned wallets had memories of losing one themselves. Andele Boomsma, a young man with a punk haircut, picked up a billfold in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden. "As a child, I lost a wallet in an amusement park," he said. "It was never returned." Now he could spare someone else the same hassles.

But the most poignant example of empathy came from Brian Toothill, a Canadian who found one of our wallets in a telephone booth in Saskatoon. "Your wallet was down low in the booth, and I thought it might have belonged to a handicapped person in a wheelchair," he told us. "They'd need the money more than I do, wouldn't they?" Well, maybe not. At the time, Brian was out of work, and minutes before returning our wallet he had been searching for bottles and cans he could recycle for cash. Now there's a guy with his values in place.

A century ago, Oscar Wilde observed that the one thing impossible to resist is temptation. Now that we've put his axiom to the test, we're happy to report that Oscar was probably too cynical. Okay, maybe not by much, but you do have nearly a six-in-ten chance of getting your wallet back. For the rest of you, those who kept the cash, you've got our number-and we know where you live.

Check out READER DIGEST on the web at: www.readersdigest.com

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