China shared the bottom rankings with the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, as African and Asian countries generally received poor grades.

“Honest behaviour is a central feature of economic and social life,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “Civic honesty around the globe”, published in the latest edition of the American peer-reviewed journal Science.

“Without honesty, promises are broken, contracts go unenforced, taxes remain unpaid, and governments become corrupt,” they said.

The study’s lead author, Alain Cohn, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, called China’s poor showing surprising.

“It could be that the level of altruism is relatively low in China, but this is pure speculation,” he told the South China Morning Post in an email.

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The project’s focus was to examine whether people behaved more or less dishonestly when given a financial incentive to do so, he said.

“Like in many other countries, people in China were more likely to return a wallet when it contained a greater amount of money,” Cohn said, adding that the study suggested Chinese people cared a lot about not viewing themselves as thieves.

Wu Lin, a Wuhan University professor of sociology and public-trust scholar, called the study’s findings “a bit unnerving”, noting they suggested that people in countries with a predominantly white population tended to be more honest than others.

“There may be some problems in their method,” he said.

In 2013, the researchers began dropping off more than 17,000 wallets in 355 cities around the globe.

In July 2015, some 400 wallets were deposited around the Chinese cities of Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Xian.

The wallets differed from typical folding holders for money and plastic cards.

They consisted of a small, transparent plastic bag that allowed people to see what was inside and contained a card with a name and email address on it, a key and a handwritten shopping list.

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The words on the shopping list in China were “bottled water”, “bun”, “instant noodle” and “apple”, according to the paper in Science.

Some wallets contained 49 yuan (US$7) in cash while others contained no money at all.

The researchers zeroed in on five types of location in each city – banks, cultural institutions (such as theatres and museums), post offices, hotels and police stations – and approached people working at the reception counters.

Speaking to the receptionist in the local language, following a script standardised for all countries, a researcher would say: “Hi, I found this on the street just around the corner. Somebody must have lost it. I am in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?”

Then the researcher would leave the wallet on the counter and depart immediately.

The wallet’s owner could be contacted by using the email address on the card, the researchers wrote.

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The number of received emails provided data for measuring “civic honesty” or “voluntary action refrained from opportunistic behaviour”, they wrote.

In nearly all countries, the number of emails increased when money was included in the wallets, or when the amount of money was increased, according to the study.

The researchers also found a greater tendency to report the wallets in countries at higher geographical latitudes with a longer history of democracy, stronger electoral rule, better primary education and a higher share of the population identifying as Protestant.

By contrast, there was less reporting from countries with stronger family ties, hotter climates and less use of personal pronouns, such as “I”, in their language – suggesting a low presence of individualism.

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Wu said that limitations in the methodology would have hurt the accuracy of the research work.

“It studied a very specific group of people – receptionists working at a counter,” he noted. Reception-area staff in China – the world’s most populous country – often work under high pressure and strain, he added.

Other variables would have distorted the findings as well, Wu said.

“The receptionist might have put it aside because the wallet contained no or little money. There were no important personal items such as a credit card, ID or driving licence. It is possible they forgot it after a long day’s work.”

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In addition, most Chinese citizens do not use email for daily communication, Wu said, adding that the report rate for China might have been higher if the card had a phone number or WeChat account on it.

Wu also pointed out that wallets are rarely used in Chinese cities today because most people pay for things by mobile phone. “The method (of taking money out of a wallet to pay for something) is outdated,” he said.

Dr Cohn defended the study’s method, saying all these elements had been considered but none seemed to explain why China’s score was so low.

“We measured how many other customers were present during the drop-offs, which serves as a proxy for how busy the employees were,” he said. China did not stand out in terms of busyness among all the countries, ranking 20th.

“Moreover, when we control for the extent to which businesses use email to interact with their customers and suppliers (using data from the World Bank), we still find that China ranks last,” said Cohn.

“While all of these explanations seem plausible at first glance, they are not supported by the data,” he said.