London is known for being one of the busiest cities in the world, and its travelers have a reputation for keeping to themselves.
Our video team decided to test how considerate and honest West Londoners are when they think no one is watching during a social experiment.
MailOnline reporter Nick Bolwell hit the streets of Kensington and Notting Hill to find out how many people would stop and alert someone who had dropped their wallet.
Armed with a film crew and a fake wallet, Nick embarked on his mission to see if Londoners really care about each other.
Nick dropped the wallet 30 times around the area to test how many people would actually alert him to his mishap.
MailOnline took to the streets of Notting Hill to find out how many people in the area would stop and alert someone who had lost their wallet.
MO reporter Nick Bolwell travelled to the Kensington and Notting Hill areas of west London armed with camera equipment and a fake wallet.
It turns out that busy Londoners are a lot more helpful than their reputation would have us believe.
Of the 30 people who were within sight of the missing wallet, almost all of them stopped to alert our reporter.
Video footage captured by MailOnline shows many busy Londoners taking time out of their day to rush to catch up with Nick after he ‘dropped’ his wallet.
There were only a few who watched the event and said nothing, and one who ignored it completely, most likely because he didn’t notice that he dropped his wallet.
One person who participated confessed that he did not believe that anyone would help him return his own wallet.
Of course, this is not the first time that a social experiment like this has been carried out to measure public honesty.
He 2019 Science Journal Study ‘Civic Honesty Around the World’ The goal was to test the balance between self-interest and altruistic behavior on a global scale, with over 17,000 wallets distributed around the world.
The report begins with the statement: “Rationalist approaches to economics assume that people value their own interests above the interests of outsiders.”
Nick dropped the wallet 30 times around the area to test how many people would actually alert him to his mishap.
Some people didn’t react when the wallet fell, but most alerted our reporter Nick
Nick found that the general public was eager to tell him about the wallet accident.
But the study found that people were actually much more honest than expected, especially when large sums of money were at stake.
Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan, lead author of the study, said: National Public Radio At the time, “the highest reporting rate was found in the case where the wallet included $100,” he says.
Forty-six percent of wallets were reported to have no money, compared with 61 percent of those with about $13 and 72 percent of those with nearly $100.
Cohn offered some reasons for this, explaining: “The more money a wallet contains, the more people say they would feel like they were being robbed if they didn’t return the wallet.”
Is this honesty simply due to self-denial? Not exactly, suggests Duke University economist Dan Ariely.
He explained that the study in the journal Science “shows in a very natural and experimental way that our decisions about dishonesty are not based on a rational cost-benefit analysis, but on what we feel comfortable with from a social norm perspective and how much we can rationalize our decisions.”
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