John Helliwell stands near the parkade paying station where he left a gift card enclosed in an envelope with only his name before an attendant found and returned it to him, in Vancouver, B.C, on Feb. 18. Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail

Jordan Cue returned home to Vancouver from a trip to Arizona several years ago, without his wallet. It went missing at a pool party, along with most of his ID and about $500. Gone forever, Mr. Cue assumed – until he received a message on social media from a stranger in Baltimore, Md., requesting his address. His wallet soon arrived in the mail, with all his cards and money tucked inside.

Mr. Cue was pleased to get his wallet back. But despite his firsthand experience with the kindness of a stranger, he still believes that most people would take the money and run – or dodge any effort to return it. “Most people,” he says, “don’t have the drive to go out of their way.”

Mr. Cue, however, is not his own idea of “most people.” Not long after his own lost-wallet luck, while working in an underground parking lot, the then-25-year-old found a gift card in an envelope on the ground. He Googled the name, made contact by e-mail and drove across the city at the end of his shift to drop it in the owner’s mailbox.

That gift-card owner just happened to be John Helliwell, one of the world’s leading happiness experts, with a particular interest in studying lost wallets.

According to Dr. Helliwell’s research, the same people who rate themselves as highly likely to return a lost wallet also doubt a stranger would act so altruistically – much like Mr. Cue.

But those strangers deserve more faith. Lost wallets come back far more often than many of us think – roughly two-thirds of the time in Canada, according to several real-world experiments.

And our happiness would be higher, Dr. Helliwell says, if we were more accurately optimistic about our fellow citizens. Believing in the benevolence of others creates a more connected and trusting society, where “a stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet,” he says, rather than someone to be viewed with suspicion.

Dr. Helliwell is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of British Columbia and a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, which has been publishing country-specific data since 2012. About a decade earlier, however, a trio of Canadian researchers, including Dr. Helliwell, came up with the idea of asking people about wallets, to get a more specific measurement of trust. For the past 20 years, it has been used off and on in national and global surveys.

How likely people think it is wallets will be returned is associated with a country’s social capital – the level to which people believe they live in a co-operative, caring society. But how a person answers the lost-wallet question is also associated with their individual happiness.

Dr. Helliwell says data collected for the 2021 World Happiness Report found that people who believe a lost wallet is “very likely” to be returned also reported significantly higher well-being.

Trusting your wallet will find its way home by way of a neighbour or stranger, he says, was more important for happiness than increases to income, or how highly people assessed the likelihood of harm from crime or health problems.

Mike Brcic is someone, for instance, who’d answer “very likely” to the question of whether his wallet would be returned. Like Mr. Cue, he’s proven the good will of strangers himself. In August, 2020, he discovered a wallet in the grass on Toronto Island. It contained $600 and no official identification, but he found a folded Air Canada ticket inside with a name. He was able to return the money to the owner days later – but only after a dead-end Google search, a fruitless call to the airline and, finally, waiting for someone to see his lost-and-found post on Facebook.

Between the cursing drivers, the sniping politicians and the nastiness on social media, it’s easy to think that “we’re just barely holding it together to be nice to one another,” Mr. Brcic says. But for the sake of his own well-being, he takes a different view: “I like to operate in a world where I believe in the essential goodness of most humans.”

When it comes to lost wallets and honest strangers, however, it appears he’s in the minority.

Nationally, according to data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey analyzed by Dr. Helliwell and two colleagues, more than two-thirds of Canadians think it’s somewhat or very likely that either neighbours or the police get their wallets back to them.

For strangers, however, trust plummets: Only one-third of Canadians believe the same about strangers. And while compared with findings seven years earlier, the country had gained optimism toward neighbours, the pessimistic view of people we don’t know hadn’t budged.

Yet, in reality, strangers sometimes perform better than police. Anni Isenor’s wallet vanished from her purse while she was choosing tomatoes at a Halifax grocery store in 2016. She remembers eyeballing the other shoppers, trying to spot the most likely thief. Even after replacing her wallet and ID cards, a suspicion of strangers lingered in the back of her mind.

Three years later, in December, 2019, a police officer knocked on her door: He’d found her wallet, with everything still inside, in storage at the station. A Good Samaritan, possibly even someone she’d deemed shady that day at the store, had done their part – but the police hadn’t followed up. “It’s a lesson not to judge,” Ms. Isenor says, and a reminder that it’s better to assume the best of people.

As it happens, Ms. Isenor lives in the part of the country with the highest faith in strangers; according to Statistics Canada, Atlantic Canadians are the most likely to believe they’ll see their lost wallets again, no matter if the police, a neighbour or a stranger finds it.

We’d all do better to adopt a little more East Coast optimism, Dr. Helliwell says, because when tested, strangers actually return wallets significantly more often than we expect.

As part of a 2019 study published in Science, a research team surveyed economists and laypeople: In both cases, a majority predicted that wallets were less likely to come back if they had money inside. To test the idea, researchers ran an experiment in 40 countries, where 17,000 “lost” wallets were handed to employees in places such as theatres, banks and post offices, with a request to return them to the owner. Half the wallets had money, and all of them contained the fictional owner’s e-mail address.

Altogether, about 55 per cent of the wallets were returned, on average, but there were large differences among the countries. Canada placed a respectable 13th, well behind the leading Scandinavian countries, but ahead of the United States.

But the prediction that people would take the money was wrong: In all but two countries, the wallets with cash were significantly more likely to come back than those without. And when researchers added even more money to some wallets, those ones were returned at even higher rates.

Alain Cohn, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and a co-author of the study, speculates that people are naturally invested in a desire to appear honest to others and to reinforce their own self-image as an honest person. The money was a larger return on that investment, even when people had a stronger incentive to steal.

Still, when it comes to creating that co-operative, caring society, our motivation matters less than our actions – especially when we help someone we’ll likely never see again. “For a society to function smoothly,” Dr. Cohn says, ”you need people to be able to trust each other, even if there is no potential gain from future interactions.”

Trust is also contagious, he says. The more a person sees themselves as honest, the more honestly they act. And the more witnesses to their honest deeds, the more citizens adopt the same behaviour.

That’s why, in surveys, trust for neighbours and strangers tends to increase as people age, and have more exposure to positive experiences with life’s lost wallets, literal or metaphorical.

Not even the real-world research, however, could completely reverse Mr. Cue’s doubts about strangers. To his mind, society just feels more self-centred these days, although he did concede there are exceptions. “There’s definitely a lot of great people that are still going to return wallets and deserve trust. It’s just hard to pick them out these days.”

Dr. Helliwell, for his part, still recalls the delight he felt at Mr. Cue’s kindness. “How special it was to find that envelope, marked only by my name, returned to our doorstep that same evening,” he says. It was, as he wrote in a thank-you e-mail to Mr. Cue, a fresh example of the “prevalence and strength of benevolence.”

After studying happiness for decades, he knows Mr. Cue’s good deed symbolizes much more than a lost possession. “It’s about living in a society where you think people care about each other,” he says, and turning that belief into positive action.

“There are nice people out there,” he insists. “Take off your dark glasses, and look carefully, and you’ll be happier.”

Erin Anderssen, Happiness Reporter
Mahima Singh
The Globe and Mail, February 25, 2025