Are cheating and theft related? Are people who cheat also prone to steal? When was the last time you cheated?

If you cheated, how did you feel afterward? Did you feel nervous or guilty or rather superior and euphoric? As reported in well.blogs.nytimes.com.

It is possible that if you didn’t believe your cheating hurt anyone, you felt great.

Unethical behavior is increasingly studied by psychologists and behavioral management specialists. They want to understand what prompts people to abolish core values and why cheating appears to be on the rise. Understanding people's intentions can help determine interventions that can be made.

There are some real impacts of cheating, for example: software piracy costs companies $63 billion a year globally, and the I.R.S. reports an annual gap between actual and reported income - of about $345 billion.

In a recent study, participants were given a baseline assessment of their moods. Then they took a word-unscrambling test. After finishing, they were handed an answer key, told to check their answers, and give the number of correct responses. For each right answer, they would earn $1.

What participants did not know, is that researchers could tell if they correcting wrong answers. The outcome: 41 percent did.

The follow-up assessment of their moods indeed showed that the cheaters, on average, felt an emotional boost which the honest participants didn’t.

Does it disturb you to know that people feel happier after cheating?

In another study they removed the financial incentive. A new group would take a test on a computer. The results, they were told, would correlate with their intelligence and likelihood of future success.

However, 77 participants were told that if they saw a pop-up message offering them the correct answer, they should ignore it and continue working.

Amazingly, 68 percent of this group cheated at least once, clicking the button for the correct answer. In the follow-up assessment, this group also reported a rise in upbeat feelings.

Why did people feel so good about cheating? Was it the relief of not being caught? Which would imply that while cheating, they felt stress or did they deceive themselves, rationalizing or minimizing their cheating behavior to feel better?

Would a theft prevention class help curb cheating and stealing? I think so.