Toronto Gets Second Place in Honesty Test

As mentioned in Tuesday's Morning Brew, an International study by Reader's Digest found Toronto in second place for honesty.

The not-so-scientific but still sort-of interesting test worked like this: A brand new, totally usable phone is left and watched from a distance. Once picked up, those crazy Reader's Digest reporters give the cell a ring and see if the city dweller would pick up the phone and return it to the calling tester who claimed they lost it. The more phones that got returned, the more honest the city was deemed.

As I expected, we're pretty honest. Torontonians returned 28 out of 30 phones found, getting us second place out of populated cities in 28 countries. We lost out to the capital city of Slovenia, Ljubljana - they returned all but one phone to get first place.

The only other Canadian city on the list, Montreal, got fifth place. Across all of the cities, a surprising 68% of 'lost' phones were returned. On the low side, don't lose your cell phone in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong - both only returned 13 out of 30 phones.

The best thing about returning a Blackberry a friend and I found in a cab to its owner was the feeling of being good, big-city-dwelling honest human beings (and the bottle of pricey wine the very grateful owner insisted we have).

Photo: beemphoto.com from the blogTO Flickr Pool