What Is the Wallet Test? Researchers Dropped 17,000 Wallets, and the Ones With More Cash Came Back More Often

What is the wallet test? It's a field experiment where researchers deliberately turn in "lost" wallets at public counters around the world and count how many get returned — a way of measuring a country's honesty with behavior instead of a survey question. Pete heard about it from a bartender in Copenhagen at nine at night, in an empty bar, because nine is apparently far too early to be drinking in Denmark. The bartender's name was Alan. The bar was called Charlie's. Neither of those facts is relevant, and both of them are true.

What Is the Wallet Test, Exactly?

The wallet test is a field experiment that measures civic honesty by handing in lost wallets at institutions across many countries and tracking what share of recipients contact the owner to return them.

The version everybody means is a 2019 study in Science by Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal, David Tannenbaum, and Christian Lukas Zünd, titled "Civic honesty around the globe." It's the reason the phrase exists outside of academic journals.

17,303 Wallets, 355 Cities, 40 Countries

The setup was gloriously boring, which is what makes it work. Research assistants walked into banks, theaters, museums, post offices, hotels, and police stations, handed a clear plastic wallet to whoever was at the counter, said they'd found it outside and were in a hurry, and left.

Every wallet held three business cards with an email address, a grocery list, and a key. Some held no money. Some held about $13.45 in local currency, adjusted so the amount felt the same in Warsaw as in Zurich. The only measurement was whether anyone emailed within 100 days. That's 17,303 wallets across 355 cities in 40 countries — a real number, not an estimate.

The Result Nobody Predicted, Including the Economists

Standard economic logic says the more cash inside, the more tempting it is to keep, so returns should drop as money goes up. The researchers asked professional economists to predict the outcome. They asked regular people too. Both groups called it the same way.

Both groups were wrong. Wallets with no money were reported 40% of the time. Wallets with money were reported 51% of the time. Then the team ran a third condition in the US, the UK, and Poland with $94.15 inside, expecting the effect to finally break — and reporting climbed to 72%.

More cash, more honesty. The explanation the authors landed on is that keeping a wallet with real money in it forces you to think of yourself as a thief, and most people will pay a surprising amount to avoid that. An empty wallet is a lost item. A fat one is a moral problem.

Denmark Scored an 82

Country by country, average reporting rates ran from about 14% at the bottom to 76% at the top, with Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden clustered at the high end and China at the very bottom — 7% when the wallet had no cash in it.

Denmark returned 82% of the wallets that held $13.45. The United States returned 57% of its wallets with money, which puts America closer to the top of the table than the bottom, behind most of Western Europe plus Canada and Australia. (The 40% number that gets quoted around this study is the global average for the empty wallets, which is a much harsher figure than any one country earned.)

So the headline Pete got from a bartender holds up: lose your wallet in Copenhagen and you're getting it back most of the time.

The Bartender's Correction

Pete's first instinct was the flattering one — Danes must just be nicer people. That's where most Americans land, and the bartender walked him off it.

It isn't niceness. It's structure. Denmark leads the world in interpersonal trust, with about 74% of Danes agreeing that most people can be trusted, ahead of Norway at 72% and Finland at 68%. Trust that high isn't a personality trait held by six million individuals at once. It's what happens when the institutions have been reliable long enough that assuming good faith stops being naive and starts being accurate.

A Dane who hands in your wallet isn't performing generosity. They're doing the thing that obviously happens next, in a country where they'd expect the same from you — and where, at 82%, they'd usually be right.

What the Wallet Test Can't See

The honest caveat, because we'd rather say it than have you find it: the study measured one behavior through one channel. Did somebody email a stranger? That's it.

Researchers have pushed back on exactly that point, particularly around China's last-place finish. Follow-up field work published in 2023 and again in 2025 found that local norms shape what "doing the right thing" looks like — in some places the expected move is to hold the item and wait for the owner to come back, or to hand it to an authority, not to fire off an email to an address you don't recognize. Which means the wallet test is a good measure of one specific honest act, and a shakier measure of national character.

Fair. It's still the best behavioral snapshot anybody has taken of civic honesty at global scale, and it beats asking 40 countries to rate their own morals on a scale of one to ten.

What an 82 Actually Buys You

The reason the wallet test stuck with Pete for the rest of the trip is that it turned a vibe into a number. Copenhagen feels safe and calm and weirdly frictionless. That's easy to write off as a tourist impression, or as Danes being pleasant. The wallet test says the feeling corresponds to something you can count.

And what it counts is closer to habit than virtue: a few hundred years of a society making the honest move the normal move, which is slower and more boring and far more durable than being nice.

Episode 115 of Sorta Sophisticated is Pete's six days in Copenhagen, from a nearly fatal misunderstanding of the bike lanes to why the coziness has rules underneath it. Also in there: the $10 million apartments legally required to share their waterfront with a public pool, and the unwritten Danish code that says you're not allowed to think you're special.

Hear the full episode here 👇 Copenhagen: The Postcard Lies A Little (Episode 115)