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March 26, 2007 -- New Yorkers Offer Many Happy Returns—of Wallets
New Yorkers aren’t rude, we’re just in a hurry. And we’re not dishonest, despite a study done in the ‘90s that found that only 30 percent of pens purposely dropped on New York streets were returned to their owners.
Because students in an urban studies class at Barnard College recently hypothesized that the low pen return rate might be related to the low value of the lost object. And that a more valuable item was actually more likely to get returned to its owner. So they purposely dropped 132 wallets all around the city. It contained a subway card, four dollars, and cards identifying the owner and an address. Lo and behold, the wallet was returned to the presumed owner 82 percent of the time. Three percent of the time it was returned to someone the finder incorrectly assumed to be the owner. And 13 percent of the time the wallet just laid there not being noticed.
Which means that only two percent of the time did somebody pocket the wallet, in one of the city’s richest neighborhoods, by the way. Clearly most New Yorkers know that virtue is its own reward, at least compared to four bucks.
