Dan Ariely talks about pain and cheating. In a nutshell: people report less pain when (i) they experience the strongest pain first; (ii) they experience less pain for a longer interval rather than more pain for a shorter interval; (iii) they can take breaks. The data falsifies the common intuition that people will prefer short, high intensity pain. In general, people tend to cheat more when (i) they obtain things other than actual cash; (ii) they observe in-group members cheating successfully; they tend to cheat less when (i) they take away cash; (ii) they observe out-group members cheating successfully; (iii) they experience priming with moral concepts such as the Ten Commandments.
Post yours in comments. I've put a couple with the theme "how brains work" down there.
For what it's worth, the book has been published and should answer anyone's questions on the subject. I have it, but I've only just began to read it. The book might be somewhat disappointing to some people in the sense that not everything falls in place once you hear the theory. The theory is rather blunt, but sounds convincing so far.
They have a summary of the theory in the introduction:
"Our brains are engaged full time in real-time (risky) heuristic search, generating presumptions about what will be experienced next in every domain. This time-pressured, unsupervised generation process has necessary lenient standards and introduces content --not all of which can be properly checked for truth-- into our mental spaces. If left unexamined, the inevitable errors in these vestibules of consciousness would ultimately continue on to contaminate our world knowledge store. So there has to be a policy of double-checking these candidate beliefs and surmisings, and the discovery and resolution of these at breakneck speed is maintained by a powerful reward system --the feeling of humor; mirth-- that must support this activity in competition with all the other things you could be thinking about."
In fact, they argue that such facility might be necessary for truly intelligent computational agent:
"... We propose to tackle this prejudice head on, arguing that a truly intelligent computational agent could not be engineered without humor and some other emotions."
Awesome follow-up.