Animal trainers call this a "cheap behavior" vs. an "expensive behavior." In animal parlance, 10 minutes of perfect heeling is expensive, sniffing on a walk is cheap. In human terms, running a marathon is expensive, walking to the kitchen to get breakfast is cheap. To get expensive behaviors, you have to work up to them from cheap behaviors AND you need to reward them more heavily than the cheap behaviors. In our system, we make ethical behaviors very expensive and even often punish them and don't give much opportunity to practice them in small ways before expecting people to be able to stand up and be ethical when it's really expensive. This may be another advantage of TDD--you get many opportunities to practice being ethical in very small ways.

Because we are asking people to behave in a way that doesn't make sense for most organisms, we should actually be grateful anyone is ever ethical and be surprised when it happens. All the incentives line up the other way.

You may not be surprised to hear I have a post kicking around in the back of my head called "Is quality software too expensive." Often we are thinking on similar tracks haha.