Would you steal a dollar? How about a can of soda?

We interrupt this primary day to bring you one of those fun ethical puzzles.

A researcher at MIT conducted some experiments to see gauge situational ethics -- basically to see under what conditions people might steal something or cheat.

Here's how the test worked: Ariely and his students went around and left six-packs of Coke in randomly selected dorm refrigerators all over campus. When he checked back in a few days, all of the Cokes were gone.

But when he later placed plates of six loose dollar bills in those same refrigerators, not a single bill was missing when he checked back. Even though the value was comparable--and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways. Why is that?

I imagine that if he left those loose dollar bills on a table next to the refrigerators they might have gone missing also. Nobody puts money in a refrigerator -- unless you are a congressman from New Orleans.

But the Coke part of the experiment is interesting. Would you take a Coke or some food from a communal refrigerator at school or the office?

The experiment on cheating was also interesting:

For example, he gave people a test consisting of very easy math questions--but without giving them nearly enough time to finish. On average, people got four right out of 20. Then he had people take the test, score it themselves, shred the answer sheet and tell him how they did. Suddenly the average jumped to seven.

He repeated the experiment, paying people according to how many right answers they got. Same result. "Everybody cheated, but just a little." Even when there was no chance of getting caught--the evidence was shredded and participants paid themselves from a jar of money with over $100--nobody claimed 20 right answers. They just padded their results by a bit.

But then he tried another variation: Before doing the test, he asked one group of subjects to name 10 books they had read in high school. He asked another group to name as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. The group that listed the books followed the same pattern as the earlier test--they all cheated a little. But the group that named the commandments was different: Nobody cheated at all!

"Just the act of contemplating morality eliminated cheating," Ariely explains.

This sort of reminds me about how people lie to pollsters. The percentage of people who told pollsters that they voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960  jumped dramatically right after he was assassinated.

So, have you ever fudged a test score, rounding it up a bit to make yourself look better when you knew there was no chance of getting caught? Or perhaps fudged a little in a job interview or maybe inflated your income to friends? Is there any harm in doing that?