How kind are Londoners? MailOnline takes to the streets of the capital to see if busy commuters would return a dropped wallet
London is known for being one of the busiest cities in the world, with commuters having the reputation of largely keeping themselves to themselves.
Our video team decided to put to the test how considerate – and honest – West Londoners are when they think nobody’s looking during a social experiment.
MailOnline reporter Nick Bolwell hit the streets in Kensington and Notting Hill to find out how many people would stop and alert someone who had dropped their wallet.
Armed with a camera crew and a fake wallet, Nick embarked on his mission to see if Londoners really do care about each other.
Nick dropped the wallet 30 times throughout the area to test how many people would actually alert him to his mishap.
MailOnline hit the streets in Notting Hill to find out how many people in the area would stop and alert someone who had dropped their wallet
MO Reporter Nick Bolwell travelled to the West London areas of Kensington and Notting Hill armed with a camera crew and a fake wallet
As it turns out, busy Londoners are a lot more helpful than their reputation would have us believe.
Out of the 30 people who were in the eyeline of the misplaced wallet, nearly everybody stopped to alert our reporter.
Video footage captured by MailOnline shows many a busy Londoner take time out of their day to rush to catch up with Nick after ‘dropping’ his wallet.
There were just a few who observed the event and didn’t say anything, and one who ignored it completely – quite possibly because they didn’t notice the wallet dropping.
One person who took part confessed that he didn’t believe anyone would help him return his own wallet.
Of course, it’s not the first time a social experiment like this has been carried out to gauge public honesty.
The 2019 Science journal study ‘Civic honesty around the globe’ aimed to assess the balance between self-interest and altruistic behaviour on a global scale, with over 17,000 wallets dropped around the world.
The report opens with the statement: ‘Rationalist approaches to economics assume that people value their own interests over the interests of strangers’.
Nick dropped the wallet 30 times throughout the area to test how many people would actually alert him to his mishap
A few people didn’t react when the wallet dropped, but the majority alerted our reporter Nick
Nick found that the public were on the whole eager to let him know about the wallet mishap
But the study found that, in reality, people were far more honest than expected – particularly when there were bigger sums of money involved.
Alain Cohn from the University of Michigan, the study’s lead author, told National Public Radio at the time: ‘The highest reporting rate was found in the condition where the wallet included $100,’ he says.
46 per cent of wallets with no money were reported, compared with 61 per cent of those with about $13 and 72 per cent of those with nearly $100.
Cohn offered some reasoning around this, explaining: ‘The more money a wallet contains, the more people say that it would feel like stealing if they do not return the wallet.’
Is this honesty just down to selflessness? Not exactly, Duke University economist Dan Ariely suggests.
He explained that the Science journal study ‘shows in a very natural, experimental way our decisions about dishonesty are not about a rational cost-benefit analysis but about what we feel comfortable with from a social norm perspective and how much we can rationalise our decisions.’
