if you found a wallet with £1000 inside it, what would you do?

Question: if you found a wallet with £1000 inside it, what would you do?
- Keywords:
  wallet
Asked by sixfingeredfreak to Alan, Caspar, Diana, Murray, Sarah on 16 Mar 2011 in Categories: General.
- Murray Collins answered on 13 Mar 2011:
  
  Well I found £80 in an envelope hanging out of a bank deposit machine once. I handed it in to the bank staff. They wrote to me a week later to say it belonged to an old lady who’d tried to use the machine to pay her pension into her account, but there had been a fault. So I was very glad to have handed it in!
  
  I’d do the same agin.
- Alan Winfield answered on 14 Mar 2011:
  
  I would do my best to return the wallet to whoever owns it. I’d look inside to see if there was a name and address and, if there was, contact them directly. If not, then I’d take it to a police station.
  
  Although your question is about everyday honesty – it’s worth mentioning that scientific honesty is just as important. When scientists do experiments and then tell everyone what they have discovered it’s incredibly important to be completely honest – even if it means saying that the experiment didn’t give the answers that were expected. Some scientists do, sadly, cheat from time to time. The problem is they want to be famous and are tempted to make up (or alter) the results from experiments to show how brilliant they are. This is not only damaging to science, it’s also incredibly stupid because scientists who do this are often found out and lose their jobs and reputation.
- Caspar Addyman answered on 14 Mar 2011:
  
  i’d look around for the hidden psychologists. I can just imagine a psychologist deciding to place a wallet there and then observe what people would do. . In fact, now that I remember. a psychologist called Richard Wiseman did a version of this.. although not with quite that much moneyh. He found that people would be more likely to hand in a wallet if there was picture of babies inside it.
  
  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6681923.ece
  
  Psychologist do lots of strange things like this..
  
  “Dan Ariely and his students went around and left six-packs of Coke in randomly selected dorm refrigerators all over campus. When he checked back in a few days, all of the Cokes were gone.
  But when he later placed plates of six loose dollar bills in those same refrigerators, not a single bill was missing when he checked back. Even though the value was comparable–and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent–people responded in opposite ways. ”
  http://www.physorg.com/news127399170.html
- Sarah Thomas answered on 16 Mar 2011:
  
  I would hand it in to the police station! I believe in karma!
- Diana Drennan answered on 16 Mar 2011:
  
  I would look for ID to the person who lost it and try to contact them. Then I’d return it. I’ve lost mine before and not gotten it back, and I’d hate for anyone else to feel that way. I’m a firm believer in the Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. =)

Question: if you found a wallet with £1000 inside it, what would you do?

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