Excuse Me, Is This Your Phone?

We dropped 30 phones in 32 cities. How many would we get back?

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Courtesy Calling

Derrick Wolf was standing near a water fountain in New York's Central Park when he noticed a ringing cell phone on the ground. It didn't appear to belong to anyone. Should he answer it? Let it ring? Pick it up and put it in his pocket? What would you do?

After kicking at the ringing phone warily, Wolf did what he thought was the right thing. He bent over, picked it up and spoke to the person on the other end of the line. "I was hoping it wasn't a bomb," he told the caller.

Obviously, it wasn't. The caller was a Reader's Digest researcher, and Wolf, a 26-year-old technology worker, had just become an unwitting participant in an offbeat worldwide social experiment conducted by the magazine: How would busy people in bustling cities react when confronted with seemingly abandoned cell phones? Would their instinct be to help, to ignore -- or to play finders, keepers.

To get the answer, reporters in 32 countries where Reader's Digest is published "lost" 30 phones apiece in those countries' most populous cities. From Auckland, New Zealand, to Zurich, Switzerland, they "dropped" phones in heavily used public areas, then called them while observing from a distance. When someone answered a phone, reporters asked whether he or she would be willing to return it. If the person picked up the phone without answering it, the reporters waited for a call on one of the phone's preprogrammed numbers, or watched as the finder simply pocketed the phone and walked away.

• Special Report: How Polite Are We?
• Are good manners dead? We checked in 35 cities around the globe -- and got some surprising answers.
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• More Uncommon Courtesy
• We keep hearing about the death of civility -- but it's alive and well in a place you'd least expect.
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• Chart: Phones Returned, City by City
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