If you were to pass a stall today bearing the sign “Free Money,” would you pick up a crisp new £5, £10, or £20?

An experiment run by Dan Ariely would suggest only around 1 in 5 of us would for the largest of notes.  The reason being, we don’t trust the offer, there must be strings attached.

Are we distrustful by nature, or because we have some bad past (direct or indirect) experiences which makes us look the “old gift horse” in the mouth?

If I google list of least trusted people, I get 137 million results.  When I check out who are on some of these lists, there are the usual suspects: politicians, estate agents, bankers, car salespeople, insurance sellers, journalists … .

This is about how honest we think others are, but how honest are we?

One source gives UK card crimes, burglaries and criminal damage at a cost of around £400m, another suggests fraud in the workplace costs £20b.

If we suspect someone is being dishonest, we can find ourselves adjusting our own behaviour so we don’t lose out.*  At the same time, we want to think of ourselves as being good people, so we justify our behaviour by telling ourselves a story – I stayed a little longer at work so I can inflate the expenses a little.

Honesty is something full of nuance and subtlety, a lifeskill honed each day, and none of us get it right all the time, but people love when our stories come through – what we say connects with what we do – and, better still, if there are any surprises, let them be good ones.

Whether we want it or not, dishonesty creates inconsistencies within our life-story – we look at it and think, “Hmm, that doesn’t work” – and a disconnection occurs within us.  Honesty begins with connecting to our story each day – to our values and purpose and ways of expressing these.

The reason I’m exploring this is because dishonesty means we all lose out.*  To love our stories and to live them is the best way to make life better for everyone, including the person tempted to be dishonest.

(*Ariely’s example goes something like this: if four people all have £10 and can put into a pot which doubles, and the pot is then divided back equally, it means each will have £20 after the exercise.  If one person doesn’t put in, meaning there’s £30 in the pot, doubling to £60, then each gets £15, but the dishonest person has £25.  Suspecting something’s not right, next time around, the others determine to put in £2 each, which doubles to a £12 pot, meaning each gets £3 back.  The three end up with £11 each, and the dishonest with £13 – so each falls far short of the £20 possible.)