Seoul came third in an informal honesty test conducted by Reader’s Digest in 32 cities including Auckland, Zurich, and Toronto.
Titled the ``Global Cell Phone Honesty Test,’’ it was carried out by deliberately ``losing’’ 30 mobile phones in order to see how many of them would be returned to their rightful owners.
The highest percentage of returned phones was in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with a population of only 267,000. Twenty-nine of 30 cell phones were returned.
Seoul was third in the rankings with 27 phones returning to original owners. Toronto came second with 28 phones returned.
In many countries, people believe the young would behave worse than their elders, but the result shows young people were just as honest. However women were slightly more likely to return phones than were men, the magazine wrote.
The main reason that people returned a phone was they too had once lost an item of value and did not want others to suffer as they had, it wrote.