The world's least honest cities

An experiment involving 16 destinations and 192 mislaid wallets has revealed some of the worlds most and least honest
cities.
Reporters from Readers Digest, the US consumer magazine, dropped wallets at various locations from parks to shopping
centres in major cities around the globe, to see whether those residents that recovered them would attempt to contact the
owner. Each wallet contained around 30 in local currency, a mobile number, business cards, and a family photo.
In total, nearly half (47 per cent) of wallets were returned, but that figure varied wildly among the different cities involved in the
study. The most honest to feature was Helsinki, where all but one of the 12 wallets was returned to its owner. And the least
honest? Lisbon where just one was given back.
"Finns are naturally honest," said Lasse Luomakoski, a 27-year-old businessman, who found one of the wallets dropped in the
Finnish capital. "We are a small, quiet, closely-knit community. We have little corruption, and we don't even run red lights."
Another Helsinki couple in their sixties said: "Of course we returned the wallet. Honesty is an inner conviction." Other honest
cities included Mumbai, where nine wallets were returned; Budapest, where eight were handed back; and New York, where
eight owners were also tracked down. "Everyone says New Yorkers are unfriendly but theyre really quite a nice people," said
Richard Hamilton, a 36-year-old government worker from Brooklyn, found a wallet near City Hall. "I think youd be very
surprised to see how many New Yorkers would actually return [a wallet]."
London didnt fare so well just five of the 12 wallets were returned but still outshone Lisbon in the honesty stakes. Just one
wallet was returned in the Portuguese capital, and it later transpired that the couple who returned it were visiting the city from
The Netherlands.
Madrid was the second-least truthful only two were given back followed by Prague and Zurich.
The report added that: "Age is no predictor of whether a person is going to be honest or dishonest; young and old both kept or
returned wallets; male and female were unpredictable; and comparative wealth seemed no guarantee of honesty."
Holidaymakers hoping to keep hold of their valuables might also heed to advice of a recent survey by the website
Sunshine.co.uk. Its poll revealed that one in seven Britons has been pickpocketed while overseas, with Rome, Marrakech,
Spains Costa del Sol and Dubrovnik among the destinations where youre most likely to become a victim.


Number of wallets returned (out of 12)
Lisbon 1
Madrid 2
Prague 3
Zurich 4
Rio de Janeiro 4
Bucharest 4
Warsaw 5
London 5
Ljubljana 6
Berlin 6
Amsterdam 7
Moscow 7
New York 8
Budapest 8
Mumbai 9
Helsinki 11












Is Facebook sharing making us more vain?

Facebook is set up, through its tools and ideology of 'sharing', to encourage users in a relentless PR campaign for themselves
Due to its near omnipresence in our society (24 million UK users each day), and some over-inflated claims about its role in
several popular uprisings, Facebook has taken on an almost godlike status in the cultural consciousness. But some have long
suspected that Facebook is not a purely benevolent overlord, and recent psychological research has started to pose the
question: is Facebook making people more vain?

In a society where the cult of celebrity is arguably more pervasive than any formal religion, Facebook has given everyone the
chance to be a mini-celebrity. Projected into every nook and cranny of daily life via mobile phones, tablets and laptops, a
Facebook profile acts as a personal PR campaign. Friends become the paparazzi eagerly awaiting the next photo op, and users
live in constant fear of being tagged in a not-so-flattering picture. Users are encouraged to compete with others to see who is
more famous by using the irrefutable metric of "friends" and "likes". By extension, users apply this metric almost subconsciously
to rate how important, popular and attractive people are in real life. This competition is seemingly causing adverse health
effects, with one study revealing that young women and girls in particular suffer extra body image issues as a result of looking at
other people's Facebook pictures. More than half of those polled in a survey for the Centre for Eating Disorders said looking at
photos of themselves on Facebook increased their body consciousness, with 44% saying they wished they had the same body or
weight as the person pictured.

A Facebook profile is often a carefully constructed public image: it reflects how you want others to see you, rather than who you
actually are. Like some sort of grotesque, endless carousel, people are portrayed as constantly smiling, on nights out, or on
holiday. Consumer culture encourages us to favour happy, affluent people, so it is little surprise people feel pressured to
present themselves in their best light on their profiles. Pictures are vetted, carefully selected and sometimes even
Photoshopped. Weaknesses, insecurities and imperfections are generally left out. The problem is, these are the very things that
make us lovable human beings the Facebook profile is just a vacuous, usually unrepresentative, projection of the user.
Perhaps one of the greatest testaments to the vain nature of Facebook use is that, while the site offers the user an almost
unprecedented platform to transmit all sorts of content, most users use this platform to upload pictures of themselves. The
question is, why? Expectations create norms and the central expectation on Facebook is self-promotion. Facebook users are
expected and encouraged to upload a relentless stream of photos of themselves under the non-offensive ideology of sharing,
via the tools of profile pictures and albums.

Vanity in the form of picture-sharing is the unquestioned norm that underscores Facebook. Nowhere does it specify that photos
must be of the narcissistic kind, and occasionally you may stumble across pictures of art or some great photography, but the
majority of photos uploaded to Facebook are not of this nature. If self-promotion on Facebook is a rough metric for vanity, it
has risen steadily: the number of profile pictures uploaded to Facebook per user trebled between 2006 and 2011. Users aren't
necessarily to blame for this, Facebook is geared this way for a reason: it's addictive. That small rush of euphoria experienced
from getting a large number of likes or comments makes users feel good about themselves. But the sensation is fleeting,
reminiscent of the buzz experienced from a session of retail therapy. I think this insatiable appetite for approval that Facebook
fosters is one of the reasons it is so successful, but it is ultimately unfulfilling and leads many users to have a love/hate
relationship with their Facebook profile. Doubtless there is an argument to be made that narcissistic types on Facebook are vain
in real life anyway, and their profile just offers them a platform for their self-obsession. Equally, I'm not suggesting that all
Facebook users are vain. But the central tools of Facebook, such as profile pictures and status updates, go hand in glove with
narcissism, and if that is then feeding into poor self-image and depression, it is not something that should be ignored.