I worked on several commercial digital music projects in the time span between early napster and entrenched itunes. One regularly repeated meme of the era was that people didn't want to pirate music, they just wanted it "as easy" or "no drm" or "ala carte" or "all you can eat". While statistically these were all guaranteed to be true for at least some users, in aggregate they were red herrings. The industry was in th…
As far as cheating goes, I would put it this way: humans seem to have an appetite for risk. The irony of cars becoming safer is people drive faster and more dangerously. Every person has a different tolerance level. I see cheating as being in that same dimension, at least to some degree.
Part of it is also social constructs. Divorce once had a huge stigma. Now it doesn't. Now people get more divorced. This is of course a simplistic example and by no means demonstrate definitive causation but fundamentally it's reasonable to assume that the difference between being ostracized vs "nobody cares" has to have a significant effect.
It's also I think why law and order is such a tenuous thing. In the West where there are strong states, relatively low corruption and relatively strong enforcement (compared to, say, African countries). This keeps most people honest as the risk of getting "caught" is sufficiently high to stop such behaviour. In more lawless countries there seems to be a tragedy of the commons in play where many more people think to line their own pockets at the expense of the state because everyone else is doing it.
How you get above the line to sufficient conformity is a bit pf a mystery once you're below the minimum threshold.