Did you know that if you lose your wallet you will have a better chance of recovering it if you keep a photo of a smiling baby inside??
The psychologist Richard Wiseman put the inhabitants of Edinburgh to the test by means of a curious experiment that consisted of leaving abandoned wallets in different parts of the city. The objective was to discover how many of these wallets were returned directly to their fictitious owners without going through the police.
Before making the distribution, the portfolios were divided into different groups according to the type of personal (fictitious) photos they carried inside. The portfolio groups were as follows:
Group 1: Pet Photo Wallets.
Group 2: Wallets with photos of elderly couples.
Group 3: Wallets with baby photos.
Group 4: Control group. The wallets of this group carried neutral material (receipts, cards, etc.) without any personal photos.
All the wallets had some type of document (ID or driver's license) with the owner's address. In this way, the person who found the wallet could personally send it to their home instead of leaving it at the nearest police station. This was precisely what the researchers wanted to discover.
They analyzed how many of these wallets were sent directly to the owner's home (by mail or in person) without going through the police.
The results were not in doubt. The 90% of the wallets containing photos of smiling babies were returned directly to their owners' homes.
Next on the list were wallets with pictures of animals with a 53% of returns.
The elderly couple stayed in a 30%.
The control group (cards without personal photos) was reduced to a 14% of returns.
In the words of Richard Wiseman, "The face of a smiling baby immediately awakens feelings of tenderness and protection in us. These feelings lead us to want to help the person in charge of their well-being as soon as possible. "
Personally I think that to give more general results they should do similar cross-cultural studies. The way in which personal belongings are returned (if they are ever returned) can be highly influenced by the culture of each country. This study was conducted in Edinburgh (Scotland).
I was lucky enough to live in this city and at the door of my house in the middle of the street 2 Porches slept every night (none were mine). During the whole year I was there, nothing happened to them. I wonder how long they would have lasted in Spain.
In any case, when in doubt, we lose nothing by putting a picture of a baby in our wallet. It does not have to be fictional, surely we all have a baby in our close circle.
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