How to Get Your Wallet Back

There’s nothing worse than losing your wallet. Not only do you forfeit the cash that was inside, but you also have to replace all of your credit cards and id cards. It’s a slow and painful process that most people try to avoid at all costs.

Now there’s a way to increase your odds of getting your wallet back, according to Dr. Richard Wiseman (author of Quirkology). He recently conducted a psychology study to identify what would make a person more likely to return a wallet to its owner. Hundreds of wallets were scattered around the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. Most of the wallets included personal items: some included pictures of elderly people, a cute puppy, family portrait or a cute baby. Other wallets contained charity donation receipts, and a few contained no personal items.

What they discovered — surprisingly enough — is that the picture of a baby drove most people to return the wallet. Nine in 10 of the strangers who retrieved the wallets with a baby picture returned them. Whereas only 53 percent returned the wallet including pictures of a puppy. The other images fared even worse, and only one in seven returned the wallets with no photographs.

According to the article on Gimundo, “the success of the baby photograph speaks to a human compassion for the young that’s been passed down through the ages. To ensure our species’ survival, scientists claim that we must feel empathy and compassion for our young. Scientists say that this study supports the argument that we won’t feel compassion only for our own babies, but for any that we see—hence, the overwhelming desire a stranger would feel to return a wallet to the baby’s parent.”

Regardless of the reason why, it seems that the best way to get your lost wallet back is to get the cutest baby pictures you can find and put them inside. Those images just might be your best insurance policy if it’s ever lost.

Now I just need to go find some cute photos of babies since I don’t have any of my own. If you’re willing to donate (the pictures, not the babies), send a them my way!