KEY POINTS:
If you lose your cellphone in Auckland, there's a good chance it will be returned.
A global survey of major cities in 32 different countries has found Aucklanders are a more honest bunch than Londoners or Sydneysiders.
The Reader's Digest had its reporters plant 960 mid-priced cellphones in busy public places from Amsterdam to Zurich and observe from a distance what happened.
To identify which finders doubled as keepers, calls were placed to the cellphone to see if it was answered.
Finders also had the option of calling preset numbers stored on the phone.
In Auckland, 23 of 30 phones were returned, putting the City of Sails equal eighth in worldwide rankings.
Ljubljana in Slovenia was the most honest of all cities, with 29 of the 30 phones returned. People in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur came in with the worst results, returning 13 out of the 30. Globally, the average number of phones returned was 20.
The results of the 30 case studies carried out within central Auckland threw up some surprising results. Younger people put their elders to shame - of the seven people who acted dishonestly, all but one were aged over 50.
The exception came in Queen St, where a be-suited man, estimated to be in his 30s, pocketed a phone.
The reporter who carried out the survey in Auckland (as well as Sydney), Nicole Wraight, said people knew exactly what they were doing.
She had no doubt the people acting dishonestly would have behaved differently if they had known they were being watched.
It had been intriguing watching an affluent-looking woman deliberately take a phone. The "smartly dressed" woman grabbed the phone from a ledge in front of Smith & Caughey's in Newmarket before scurrying off down the street.
Wraight said a call was placed to the phone but it was almost immediately switched off.
The woman then made no attempt to contact the phone's owner.
"It's fascinating watching human behaviour. I did 30 of these scenarios around all parts of central Auckland - Queen St, Albert St, Chancery Lane, O'Connell St, the Viaduct [as well as Newmarket and Albert Park].
"The thing that surprised me most was how kind people were. They genuinely wanted to return the phones out of empathy."
Wraight, originally from Hawkes Bay, said it was pleasing Aucklanders were more honest than Sydneysiders. "When you think about it, Sydney people are perhaps a little more insular; they're a bit more anonymous in bigger cities."
An 8-year-old boy who found a phone in Albert Park told Wraight he would get into trouble with his mother if he wasn't honest.
And an 18-year-old student said everyone's phone was important to them and it didn't mean anything to him.
Said Wraight: "There's a general perception that young people are more dishonest, yet we found them very honest. Perhaps we should have more faith in the younger generation."
Waikato University social psychologist Dr Neville Robertson said a similar exercise was carried out in the United States in the 1960s, "except they used an abandoned car".
"In New York, it was almost immediately stripped bare, whereas in a small town the only thing that happened to it was its bonnet was closed after two days. That was because someone happened to walk by when it was raining and the engine was getting wet."
However, honesty did not necessarily come down to the size of the city but more to the sense of community within it.
"I think on the whole people are more likely to display pro-social behaviour such as returning a phone in a place where they feel a connection to other people," Dr Robertson said.
A Reader's Digest survey last year ranked Auckland as the seventh politest city when testing the courtesy of retailers. Sydney was 23rd. New York, Zurich and Toronto topped the first three places respectively.
