Scandinavians proved themselves the upstanding citizens of Western Europe, according to a wallet-dropping experiment that put continental honesty to the test.
Reader's Digest planted 10 wallets in each of 20 cities, then kept track of how many were returned to the owners, whose name, address and phone number were inside.The answer - all of them, in Oslo, Norway, and Odense, Denmark.
Or, almost none of them, in the eastern German city of Weimar and the prosperous Swiss city of Lausanne. Only two wallets were returned in each of those cities.
Swedes were not quite as honest as their neighbors in Scandinavia, returning seven of the 10 wallets dropped in Stockholm.
In all, passers-by returned 116 of the 200 wallets, or 58 percent, the U.S.-based magazine said in its July edition. Last year, 67 percent of wallets were returned in a similar experiment in the United States.
Besides the identification, each billfold contained family snapshots and the equivalent of $50. The people conducting the experiment left the wallets on streets, in shops and in other public places, then watched the reactions of the passers-by who found them.