In a society where staple diet for news organisations are multi billion shilling scandals, what are the chances of a Kenyan who loses a wallet loaded with cash getting it back intact?
Put another way, if two friends lost their wallets, one with considerable amount of money and the other empty, who is likely to get his back?
A group of renowned researchers recently conducted a survey in 44 countries, including Kenya, using 'lost' wallets to find answers to these questions and determine civic honesty around the globe.
Their conclusions were mind boggling.
In April last year, a Nairobi tout Daniel Mwaura who became a social media celebrity overnight after he returned a wallet with Sh30,000 could be a rare breed in Kenya, according to the study.
An excited Stanley Kaberi, the wallet's owner, later confessed that the money was to cater for the medication of his sick child.
This novelty was replicated a year later in April 2019 by 27 year old honey gatherer Nicholas Sang, who collected a wallet which had Sh27,000 in a forest near Maramara Tea Estate in Bomet.
Using the national identity card retrieved in the wallet, Sang traced the owner's home in Kapsengere village in Bomet County and surrendered everything to the family and the police.
And now these two novelties which wowed the easily excitable social media have been explained by the group of scientists who have conducted a global scientific study to determine whether the chances of a wallet lost with money being returned was higher or lower compared to an empty purse.
Kenya’s integrity levels are still very low, according to the international study, which could only be rivalled by China, where chances of recovering a lost wallet with or without money are the lowest in the world.
The results, which were published in the journal Science on June 20, are as startling as they are ground breaking.
During the study carried out in 355 cities in 40 countries around the globe, among them Kenya, more than 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money were taken to public and private institutions to gauge whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets.
At first, social scientists and economists expected that lost empty wallets or those with insignificant amounts of money were likely to be returned to the owners, while those with substantial amounts were withheld by the recipients.
But chances of a wallet loaded with money being returned to the owner are higher than that of an empty one.
The report, titled Civic Honesty Around the Globe, is authored by Alain Cohn (University of Michigan, US), Michel André Maréchal and Christian Lukas Zünd (University of Zurich, Switzerland ) and David Tannenbaum (University of Utah, USA).
The scholars posit that "civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest". They say they wanted to examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe.
“We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets,“ they say in their report.
At the end of the research, the findings were that in nearly all countries, “citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money, contradicting predictions by professional economists and armatures who were unable to foresee this result".
This, the researchers argue, can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to “viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty”.
The researchers visited select regions where they targeted five to eight of the largest cities in each country and turned in a total of 17,303 wallets which they pretended to have collected lost.
The wallets were returned to banks, theaters, museums or other cultural establishments, post offices, hotels, police stations, courts of law or other public offices.
When the research assistants walked into a building, they approached a person at the counter and handed over the wallet explaining that it had been lost and hurriedly left without leaving contact or asking for a receipt.
These wallets were transparent to ensure that the recipients could see or inspect the contents without physically opening them.
The design of the study was such that some wallets had no money but others had the equivalent of $13.45 (about Sh1,300) or more according to the country’s spending power.
The wallet contained three identical business cards, a grocery list and a key. The business cards displayed the fictitious owner’s name (commonly used in the country) and email address.
“Our key outcome measure was whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallet. We created unique email addresses for every wallet and recorded emails that were sent within 100 days of the initial drop-off,” the report reads.
Kenya fared poorly as only 15 per cent of the wallets without money were returned while 20 per cent of those with cash were sent back to the owner.
It was among the countries with the lowest percentage of return in the study. Only China recorded the lowest level of integrity as only eight per cent of wallets without money were returned compared to 22 per cent of wallets with cash.
Mexico, the study found, was exceptional because unlike the 43 other countries sampled, chances of one getting back a lost wallet with money are lower than getting it back when it has nothing. The report found that only 10 per cent of wallets with money were returned compared to 20 per cent of those without cash which were recovered.
Denmark had the highest level of integrity -- 80 per cent of the wallets with money were returned compared to 70 per cent of the wallets without cash which was sent back to the “owners’.
Other countries where chances of a loaded wallet being returned are over 70 per cent include Sweden, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Norway and Netherlands.
In a related mini follow up study where the researchers sampled 279 top-performing academic economists, the results were equally startling.
“Like our non-experts, this sample also did not expect reporting rates to increase for wallets with greater amounts of money,” the scholars explain.
