Are finders keepers around the world?
Your students need lots of practice reading graphs. Here is a ready-to-go activity that you can use tomorrow to have your students exploring a fascinating experiment with somewhat surprising results.
In this experiment, researchers distributed over 17,000 “lost” wallets in 355 cities across 40 countries. The wallets were transparent and contained a grocery list, a key, and three business cards with contact information for the owner. Each wallet either had US$13.45 or no money. Researchers “turned in” these wallets to employees at various public and private institutions such as banks, theatres, museums and hotels. The key outcome was to measure whether the recipient contacted the owner to return the wallet. Additionally, researchers were curious if the presence of money in the wallet affected whether or not the recipient attempted to return the wallet.
This dataset shows the return rate of “lost” wallets with and without money for each of the 40 countries included in the experiment.
If you prefer to work with a smaller dataset, you can find an abridged dataset with data from only 20 of the 40 countries here:
Discussion Questions
1.) Does having money in the wallet affect whether or not people returned the wallet? Which specific aspect of the data do you see as evidence for your answer.
2.) Graph the data with country on the X axis and Reporting Rank on the Y axis to highlight and see which countries appear to have the most “honest” citizens. Does it appear that there are differences between countries? Where does the return rate for the United States fall on the list of countries in the dataset? What type of data could be collected that might help explain any differences between countries in the rate of returning the lost wallets?
This dataset and the full paper can be found HERE
News coverage of the data: