Keep Baby Photos In Your Wallet and You May Just Be More Likely To Get it Returned After Losing It

July 13, 2009 by tiffanyb
Filed under: News

A new study shows that people are more likely to turn in found wallets if they contain baby photos.

Scientist conducted a study to see how honest people were. They left 240 wallets around Edinburgh last summer and they monitored which ones were returned to their proper owners. None of the wallets had any money, but they did contain other valuables such as raffle tickets and membership cards.

Some of the wallets were stuffed with receipts showing the person just donated to a charity and other ones had one of four photographs in them: a baby picture, a picture of a dog, a family picture or an elderly couple.

Professor Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, who supervised the study, reported that 42% of the wallets were returned in total. Surprisingly, 88% of those returned were the wallets that had the picture of the baby in them, compared to 53% for the dog, 48% for the family, and only 28% for the elderly couple.

The wallets that contained the charity donation card, received a very poor return rate of approximately 15%.

Wiseman told The Daily Telegraph: “The baby kicked off a caring feeling in people, which is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective. We were amazed by the high percentage of wallets that came back.”