READER’S DIGEST GLOBAL CELLPHONE HONESTY TEST
“Excuse me, is this your phone?”
We dropped 30 phones in 32 cities around the world. How many would be returned?

From the Editors

On a cool, overcast morning near downtown Toronto, 45-year-old Carlo Thorne has stopped by Gerrard Square, a small indoor shopping mall, during a long fitness walk. When he hears an abandoned cellphone ring, he answers it and speaks to the woman on the other end of the line. Thorne agrees to wait for her to come and retrieve it, later telling her, “I was raised in a spiritual family, so we always give back what is not ours. If I’d left it, it would be like stealing.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, in a square in central London’s lively and cosmopolitan Soho district, another cellphone has been mislaid next to a statue of King Charles II. Close by, a man in his late 20s wearing a casual black jacket is feeding bread to the pigeons. He waits for a gaggle of Japanese tourists to pass by, then grabs the phone. Glancing around warily, he hurries away into crowded Oxford Street. He doesn’t call any of the numbers in the phone’s directory, and the phone’s owner has not seen it since.

In the Bosques de Palermo, the largest park in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, Marcelo Elías jogs past an abandoned cellphone. It’s ringing. The 38-year-old caretaker stoops to answer it. “Yeah, you’ve lost your handset near the running track,” he tells the caller. “Where are you?”
The grateful owner tells him she’s five blocks away. Soon afterwards, Elías runs up and hands over her phone.

In each of these incidents, the people who had mislaid their phones were not the careless members of the public they appeared but Reader’s Digest researchers from our editions around the world conducting an experiment. Last summer we made headlines internationally when we measured global courtesy.* This year we decided to test people’s honesty, sending reporters to the most populous cities in 32 countries to leave a total of 960 mid-priced cellphones in busy public places.

We observed the phones from a distance, called them and waited to see if anyone would answer and return them, call us later on numbers we had programmed into the directories or keep the phones for themselves; after all, they were tempting, brand new phones with SIM cards that would allow people to use the phones if they kept them.

We then ranked each city’s honesty according to how many phones we got back. This was not a scientific study but a snapshot of how ordinary people behave when unexpectedly confronted by the choice: Do I try to give it back or do I keep it for myself? Here’s what we found.

The honest citizens of Toronto returned an impressive 28 out of the 30 phones left in that city, coming a close second in our global rankings to Ljubljana, Slovenia. The residents of this small European city (population 267,000) returned all but one of the phones left there.

“If you can help somebody out, why not?” said 29-year-old Toronto insurance broker Ryan Demchuk, who returned a phone found close to TD Bank in an underground concourse. Demchuk echoed the sentiments of many of the people we spoke to in Canada’s most populous city (with 5.4 million). “Integrity in this city is exceptional,” said Demchuk. “I lost my wallet and got it back, and I returned two wallets in a week.”

Seoul, South Korea, was third in our rankings, followed by Stockholm, Sweden, where, for people we spoke to, doing the right thing was part of everyday working life.

Observed railway ticket inspector Lotta Mossige-Norheim, who found our phone on a shopping street and handed it back: “I’m always calling people who’ve left a handset on my train.”

There was surprise in some quarters when New York finished top of our global courtesy ratings last year, but New Yorkers proved it was no flash in the pan by tying for fifth place this year with the Indian city of Mumbai, and Manila in the Philippines. In each of these cities, 24 of the 30 phones were handed back.

Initially, New York technology worker Derrick Wolf, 25, nudged our phone nervously with his foot by a Central Park fountain before picking it up and speaking to us. “I was hoping it wasn’t a bomb,” he told us. “Security fears might stop some New Yorkers picking up a strange mobile, but most are pretty honest.”

At the bottom of the rankings, Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong tied—with only 13 of our 30 phones returned.

In Times Square on Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, a security guard picked up our phone, asked a group of smokers if it was theirs, then wrapped it in a piece of paper. When approached by our reporter, he stammered, “What phone? I didn’t see any phone. If you’ve mislaid something, report it to lost and found,” while clearly gripping the cell tightly in his hand.

Indeed, it appears you can’t always trust a man in uniform, as he was one of six shopping-centre security guards around the world—in cities from Buenos Aires to Sydney—whom our reporters observed pocketing phones.

In Bucharest, Romania—joint bottom with Amsterdam in the European rankings, with 16 phones unreturned—a 30-something man in a blue sweater was particularly keen to keep a phone we left in a grocery cart. He hung up as our reporter tried to call him, then ran off to his Skoda car, slammed down the accelerator and screeched out of the parking lot. Apparently it takes a higher power to encourage honesty in the Romanian capital. Stanciu Vica, 68, was one of several people who mentioned religion when explaining why they helped us. “My dear, how could I take something that wasn’t rightfully mine?” she asked. “God would turn me to stone.”

Wealth was no guarantee of honesty. In prosperous New Zealand, a smartly dressed woman in her 50s grabbed a “lost” phone from a ledge in front of upscale Auckland department store Smith and Caughey’s, bolted down the street and never tried to contact our reporter. By contrast, a young Brazilian woman, who looked almost destitute and had three young children in tow, handed back a cell she picked up in a São Paulo park. “I may not be rich,” she said, “but my children will know the value of honesty.”

Not everyone was quite so concerned to make a good impression on their children, however. In Amsterdam, a Dutch boy of about ten implored his parents to let him keep a phone he’d found on the Kalverstraat. They seemed of two minds, but after he’d given his mother a kiss on the cheek and a big smile, they gave in.

All over the world, the most common reason people gave for returning our phones was that they, too, had once lost an item of value and had the good fortune to have it returned.

When our reporters left a phone on a bench in Toronto’s Eglinton Square, Mike Shea answered it when it rang and, despite being in a rush, agreed to meet our female reporter at the mall’s security desk.

The 44-year-old Shea told us that he’d lost both his cellphone and his wallet in the past, and both had been returned to him. “I had no hesitation in answering, because it’s happened to me. In general, people in Toronto are really helpful.” And honest, it seems, unlike some Helsinki citizens.

“I’ve had cars stolen three times, and even the laundry from the cellar was taken,” said Kristiina Laakso, 51, who came to our aid in the Finnish capital.

So, how did the world perform in our honesty test? Globally, 654 out of 960 phones—that’s a heartening 68 percent—were returned to us. “Despite what the media tell us, crime is not the norm,” says University of California psychologist Paul Ekman, author of Emotions Revealed and an expert on deception. “People want to trust and be trusted.”

Ferenc Kozma wouldn’t argue with that. The 52-year-old Hungarian, who used to work as a builder, has been homeless for six years, yet it never occurred to him to keep the phone he found on a Budapest train platform. “You find things and you lose things,” said Kozma. “But you never lose your honesty.”