our buggy moral code

Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke university, he has posted many videos on-line about topics in behavioral economics, in this particular video he talks about cheating, and in what situations would people cheat more and when would they cheat less. To do this study he did an experiment where he handed out a sheet of paper that had 20 simple math problems and he would give the participants a certain amount of money for every question that they got correctly but the trick was that he only gave them 5 mins; on avg a normal person would solve 4 problems, when he asked the participants to keep the paper that had the questions he found out that now people apparently solved 7 problems, he also found out that people would cheat a little bit. he explained that people cheat a little bit because of something called personal fudge factor and this basically means people cheat just enough as long as it doesn't change out impression of ourselves. Then he asks how do we measure the personal fudge factor, to do this he set up 2 experiments, the first was to decrease the fudge factor, and the second was to increase the fudge facto. in the first experiment he asked people to remember the 10 commandments, but he couldn't do this experiment in college so he asked people to sign an honor code and he found out no one has cheated. in the second experiment he did the same thing with the money experiment but in this one he divided the group into thirds; 1/3 of the people shredded the paper and said i solved x number of problems and the got paid for it, another 1/3 gave back the paper and got paid, another 1/3 shredded the paper then asked the experimenter if they can get paid in tokens then they would take these tokens 12ft over and change the tokens for money he found out that this 1/3 doubled their cheating because they didn't get paid directly. In a third experiment in college he gave the students prepaid envelops and then asked the students to return whatever amount was left; in this experiment they hired an acting student that clearly cheated and got away with it, what he found out was that people increase cheating when they see someone in their group cheat but when they see an outside person they cheated less. at the end he concluded that he found out that people cheat often but by a bit, when they are reminded of their morality they cheat less, and when you increase the distance of money people cheated more.