Want to Keep Your Wallet? Carry a Baby Picture
When people find a wallet on the street, they either leave it, take it to a police station, find a way to contact the owner, and the worst thing is to keep it. What they do with it depends more on evolution that morality, according to scientists. They conducted an experiment on this and had hundreds of wallets put on the streets of Edinburgh. One of four photographs was inserted behind a clear plastic window in each of the wallets, which showed a smiling baby, a happy family, an elderly couple or a cute puppy. Some wallets had no image and some had charity papers inside.
The study found that people were far more likely to send the wallet back when faced with the photograph of the baby. Those wallets had the highest return rate, with 88 percent being sent back. Next came the wallets with the photograph of a puppy, the family and the elderly couple with 53, 48 and 28 percent respectively. The charity card and control wallets had the lowest return rates with only 20 and 15 percent.
