Ethical Dilemma: Too Much Change

Dec. 27, 2006 — -- It's probably happened to you.

You're at a department store, a grocery store, a restaurant -- and the cashier gives you too much change. Should you keep it?

Is it the store's misfortune and your lucky day?

Or should you do the right thing and return the money?

To find out what people do when they think no one's watching, "Primetime" set up hidden cameras in a New Jersey diner and gave the cashier a stack of extra $10 and $20 bills, to dispense along with the customers' change, as if by accident.

Over the course of two days, we watched as 46 different people were given too much change. What would they do?

Some, like Joseph Sergi -- who received an extra $10 -- noticed right away and returned the extra change right there at the cash register. Sergi said it was not just the right thing to do, he was also driven by his compassion for the cashier.

"I know from past experience…the cashier always has to pay if she makes a mistake," he said.

For Jerry Frain, who received an extra $20, the motivation to return the money was more basic: "I'm an Irish-Catholic and my mother always told me if I stole, I'd go to hell…You never forget those things."

Many other good samaritans spoke of the idea that "what goes around comes around," or "what you put out in the universe comes back to you."

They seemed to be evoking a popular concept from the 2002 movie "Pay it Forward." In the film, a social studies teacher gives his class an assignment to think of a way to change the world. One student comes up with the idea of "paying it forward" -- performing three acts of kindness with the condition that the recipients must, in turn, do the same for three more people.

"The notion that good deeds reciprocate one another is essential to human society," said Carrie Keating, a psychology professor at Colgate University. "It's what we count on to enable social interactions and social exchanges to work."

But while 18 of the 46 subjects returned the money right at the cash register, 26 people walked out of the restaurant with the money.