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a few weeks ago
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I lost my wallet which made me sad because it is a pain to get everything replaced
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Then I thought, what kind of person doesn't return a wallet
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And then I thought I'm a firm believer in the scientific method,
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I should test some hypothoses.
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So I got 200 identical wallets in order to drop them in each of the 20 cities you see here the goal being not
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Only to see which cities were the most and least honest, but to ask
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questions of anyone who called in to see if I could pick out some patterns among the honest ones and I wanted to make the
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Wallets look as real as possible so in each of them
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I put a fake ID with no picture so as not to bias people six American dollars and 200 Filipino dollars
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This is a way to make it look like a lot of money when in reality this is only worth 4 bucks
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Then I put in an ultrasound picture and on the back we hand wrote a date from four years ago
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And then this adorable picture of a puppy I found on reddit. The goal was in addition to the ID and the money I wanted
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To make a look like the wallet had sentimental value to the owner.
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I was trying to remove any excuse for someone not to return the wallet such as it looked fake
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Or it wouldn't be worth hassle
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If there was only 2 bucks inside of a blank wallet. So in our case if they didn't return it
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It would only be because they weren't being honest. Then we had a fake loyalty card and a random business card
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And then critically a card that looked like he came with the wallet
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That said if found please call and then we wrote the phone number.
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And then because it's impractical for me to actually visit 20 cities
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I went on the Instagram page from a YouTube channel to ask for help and right away the response was awesome. Once I'd selected my
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20 helpers I sent them instructions and shipped them each 10 wallets and then last Monday all across, North America
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operation wallet drop commenced.
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(music)
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I asked them after they dropped the wallets to try and get some secret footage if
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Possible and to do that they came up with some pretty clever methods.
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I'm actually gonna tuck the wallet underneath my car so I Drive away it stays in the parking lot
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Almost immediately calls started pouring in from all of the cities so when people call in we ask them eight
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Questions such as if they were religious or not or if there was still money in the wallet when they found it and if so
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Of course we told them just keep it. So after three days of collecting data:
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Here's what we found for starters and this blew my mind two-thirds of the wallets were returned and of those that were returned
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96 percent still had the money inside. The average age of one of the caller's was
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36 which is almost exactly the average age of a person in the U.S.
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So how old you are it doesn't seem to affect honesty.
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There's a pretty big disparity in which cities were the most and least honest
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and I'll get to the rankings in just a minute.
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But first I wanted to test a
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hypothesis that a person without a lot of money in considered poor would be less likely to return the wallet than someone who had a
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lot of money. And to do this I looked at publicly available census data and found the zip codes with the highest and lowest
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medium income then I instructed my friends helping in each city to randomly drop half the wallets in the high-income area of the city and
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then the other half in the low-income area. In each while it was marked with a unique number on the back of this card
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so we knew exactly which city and location if somebody called it in. And when we tallied it up:
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60 wallets were called in from the high-income areas and
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exactly 60 wallets were also returned from the low-income areas which I thought was pretty cool. So a rich person is no more likely to return
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A wallet than someone in the lowest income bracket who could probably use the money.
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In fact: we had one person calling who is homeless, two people calling who are living in shelters, and a fourth person who is a
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panhandler. All four of them had full wallets. Another question
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I wanted a test was if women were more honest than men it turns out a majority of the wallets were returned by men but
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Think about it that doesn't necessarily mean. They are more honest because maybe the locations they were dropped
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There's typically more men like in front of a sports bar or a hardware store so to control for this
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I had all my helping friends in each city dropped two of the ten wallets in a men's restroom
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And then two in a women's bathroom
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This way we could control the gender of the wallet finder once again this came up nearly identical
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with 23 wallets returned for men versus
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24 for women so gender doesn't seem to play a role in a person's honesty either
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And I should mention here one of the questions
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We asked the caller's was if they thought the wallet looked fake
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or
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Suspicious at all and only a very small minority did so this confirms that for those who didn't call it was likely because they were
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Dishonest and not because they thought it wasn't a real person's wallet another thing we tested was small town versus big city
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So you notice four of the cities you've probably never heard of before that's because they have populations of around a thousand people
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whereas the rest were the largest cities in North America and here we did see a
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Significant difference in the small towns the average rate of return was eight wallets whereas in the big cities
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It was six
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And I think this sort of makes sense to me because small towns tend to foster a sense of community
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Where everyone knows everyone versus the anonymity of a big city and now for a rundown of all the cities?
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I'll break them into three categories starting with the least honest
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We've got Detroit with three wallets returned and New York City with four I was really rooting for Detroit and hoping they would just surprise
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Everyone but looks like maybe they're still in the process of their rebuilding efforts then for the middle of the pack at five wallets return
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We've got Seattle, Los Angeles Miami Dallas and Edmonton and at six well. It's return
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We've got Huntsville, Alabama and New London Connecticut, which is one of our small towns next at seven wallets
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We've got San Francisco, Winnipeg and Washington DC
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The final category is the Honest Abe cities with Parma, Idaho and Las Vegas at eight wallets
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And I should mention for Vegas instead of high-income and low-income we put half on the strip and then half in the suburbs and for
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What it's worth all five dropped on the strip were returned and then at a remarkable nine wallets return
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We've got two more small cities with Nashua, Idaho and Hill City, South Dakota and then Portland
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Oregon Macon Fred and Carrie proud and finally there were two cities with an astounding
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100% return rate vote for big cities with Chicago which I didn't see coming
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And then Salt Lake City and before he just shot, Salt Lake City up to those gosh darn super nice Mormons
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It's like of the eight people wearable the interview only three said they were religious and only one
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Attended church in fact about 40% of the people who turn in wallet said they were not religious
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And this is close enough to the average for a large city that
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it's fair to say that whether or not a person was religious seem to have no outcome on their honesty according to our data and
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I should also mention that while our two Canadian cities finished right in the middle of the pack my Canadian friend saw this on his
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Facebook page right after dropping his wallets and going the extra mile with a
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Blanket Facebook post to find a random wallet owner is just about the most Canadian thing ever
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He also dropped ten wallets in Disneyland, and we were hoping to get a large number back
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But we only got four calls from individuals
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and then too from
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Security who were super confused when they had identical wallets turned in at which point they made it very clear
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They would not be calling us back if more wallets came in because they hate science so we had a third Disney Line now as
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A data point because we just don't know how many got turned into security
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So those were the findings
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And I'd say from all this I learned two things
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The first is that it's a really good idea to put your phone number somewhere in your wall
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That's probably one of the reasons we have such a high rate of return also
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I found out if you find a wallet you can drop it in any u.s.
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Post office box, and then we return it to the address found on the driver's license free of charge
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I tested this out and it totally works and the second thing is that in general
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People are way more honest than I originally thought having just lost my wallet
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I was anticipating a return rate of maybe 20%
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so to get two out of every three wallets back blew my mind in one city a
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Convenience order loved what we were doing so she kept putting the wallet back in the bathroom received someone would steal it and after six
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Times of somebody bringing the wallet back with all of the money inside she gave up trying
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Lately it seems like so much of what you see online is meant to stoke
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Outrage at some group of people versus ourselves because that's what gets shared and that begins to warp our
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Perspectives that the only good people out there are those within our own group
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but this cold hard data shows that across any age or gender or
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socio-economic background
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cross the whole religious spectrum through middle of
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America and along the coast there are lots of good people everywhere and not only that but they constitute a majority
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these people didn't call it for some reward or
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Facebook lights or because they knew someone was watching they did it because it was simply the right thing to do and I think that's
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Pretty cool and something worth remembering
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The science in this video was brought to you by my longtime friends at audible summer is coming which means between long road trips hitting
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the gym or working in the yard you can make
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Previously boring stretches of time something you actually look forward to by listening to audiobooks and to test that out for free you can go
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To audible.com slash mark Rober or simply text mark over to 500 500 in fact while doing my wallet Steakhouse for this video
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I was listening to astrophysics for people in a hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Besides energy in
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1904 the even with my background in space I learned a ton about the universe
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And how we came to discover it
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It's written for people who don't have PhDs in astrophysics, but I've genuinely curious minds about the amazing universe all around us
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And if you download it and for some crazy reason you don't like it, audible will let you swap it out for something else no
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Questions asked. So if you want to make your brain bigger by listening to this book or any other book for free again go to
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Audible.com slash Mark Rover or simply text Mark Rover to 500 500. Thanks for watching