A lost 1981 Iowa Poll revealed that Iowans were split regarding whether they would expect to be trusted to return to a restaurant and pay if they had forgotten their wallet. Interested in whether people today believe they would be similarly trusted, IPOL recently placed the same question on the March 2026 U.S. national survey. Specifically, respondents were again asked “Suppose you had finished eating at an unfamiliar restaurant and discovered that you had no money, checks, or credit cards. Would you expect the manager to trust you to come back and pay them later or would you not expect them to do that?” The results indicate that fewer respondents today thought they would be trusted.

After restoring the data for Iowa Poll #248 from April of 1981, IPOL found that Iowans were almost exactly split. The edge went to those who felt the manager would trust them to return: 48.3% of those surveyed believed in their trustworthiness compared to 47.7% who did not expect the manager to trust them. 4.0% who said they did not know if they would be trusted or not.  At the time, one in five Iowans indicated that this situation or something similar had in fact happened to them. 

When compared to the data from the March 2026 that included respondents from across the country, fewer respondents expected to be trusted. 30.2% of respondents believed they would be trusted to return to the restaurant. 47.4% of Americans did not expect to be trusted by the manager, and 22.4% did not know if they would be trusted or not. Overall, the number of people who did not expect to be trusted remained relatively similar, while the number of respondents who expected to be trusted declined, and those who did not know increased. 

When broken down to the education level of the respondents, 46.8% of high school graduates and 49.7% of those with at least some college experience expected to be trusted in the 1981 Iowa Poll. 49.1% of high school graduates and 47.7% of Iowans with some college experience did not expect to be trusted in 1981. In the 2026 poll, fewer Americans expected to be trusted, and fewer also did not expect to be trusted, with more respondents selecting that they were unsure. 29.9% of Americans with a high school diploma today would expect to be trusted, with 44.5% not expecting to be trusted. 30.5% of those having completed at least one year of college expected to be trusted, while 49.3% of this group did not expect to be trusted by the restaurant manager. 

These results aren’t necessarily surprising, as a Pew Research Center poll conducted in July of 2019 uncovers that most Americans would expect people to try to take advantage of them if given the chance. 58% of respondents reported that most people would try to take advantage of them, compared to 41% of those who claimed most people would try to be fair.

Iowa Poll #248, conducted by the Des Moines Register, was administered to a random sample of Iowans in April 1981 and includes 1011 responses. We re-ran these questions by placing them on a national survey of U.S. adults fielded from February 27 to March 5, 2026 that yielded 1000 responses. Responses for 2026 data are weighted by age, race/ethnicity, sex, income, education, region, metropolitan status, and partisanship to be nationally representative. Support for 2026 data collection was provided by the Center for Social Science Innovation at the University of Iowa through its Survey Harvest program.