A prankster has carried out a social experiment in New York to find out who would be granted more charity – a homeless single father or a drug user – and received a truly surprising result.

In a hidden cam video, prankster Coby Persin dressed up as a homeless guy and pretended to be begging. He first displayed a sign, reading: “Homeless need money for drugs, weed and alcohol,” and managed to raise a decent sum of money across just an hour.

The homeless addict was mainly assisted by young men, who encouraged him by saying “stay high, man, stay high” or “make sure you get a big bottle.”

However, things changed when the prankster put up a different sign, reading: “Homeless single father need money for charity” and was joined by a small girl, sitting on the pavement next to him.

He was left without any donations for almost the whole hour as people walked by, completely ignoring the “troubled pair”.

Ironically, the only person to support the father and the child was a homeless woman, who gave them all the money she made on the day, saying “You need it so much more than I do. You and your little girl.”

Persin told RT that he himself was surprised by the results of his experiment, as he suggested that it would’ve been easy for people to relate to a homeless with a child as “everyone has a little baby sister or a daughter.”

“The most disturbing, probably, was when there were other parents, who had children, and that they looked at me and their child looked at me and they just kept going as if I was invisible with my fake homeless child,” he said.

The prankster believes that New Yorkers supported “someone asking for weed because they thought it was cool.”