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‘The Honesty Test’: Man drops wallet 50 times, most strangers return it

Wallet honesty test

Believe it or not, but there are a lot of honest people out there. One Polish man's social experiment set out to prove this to be true.

"Hiya! In this video we'll check people's honesty and see who'll give me my wallet back," the man says in the YouTube video of his experiment.

The man dropped his wallet near strangers 50 times. Forty-nine people did the right thing and immediately returned his wallet to him.

Last fall, Reader's Digest conducted a similar experiment, dropping wallets in 16 different cities on four continents. The magazine found the residents of Helsinki, Finland, to be the most honest, returning 11 out of the 12 wallets dropped.

"Finns are naturally honest," said a 27-year-old business man who returned one of the wallets. "We are a small, quiet, closely-knit community. We have little corruption, and we don't even run red lights."

In all, 47 per cent of the dropped wallets around the world were returned.

In the spring of 2012, a woman in Calgary found a wallet carrying $1,500 in cash on the bus. With the help of the bus driver and transit officials, she was able to track down its owner, a young woman who had just moved to Calgary from Bolivia.

Last fall, an Iowa college student lost his wallet on his way to school. A good Samaritan mailed him the wallet — with an extra $10 bill inside.

And in December of 2013, Santa Claus returned a first grade student's lost wallet.

Have you ever returned a stranger's wallet? Let us know in the comments below.