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:

This dataset and the full paper can be found HERE 

News coverage of the data:

LA Times: People Are Honest
Forbes: Lost Wallet Experiment

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