I think it has more to do with the guilt vs. shame culture metric anthropologists and psychologists talk about and have documented at length. Guilt gnaws at you

I think it has more to do with the guilt vs. shame culture metric anthropologists and psychologists talk about and have documented at length. Guilt gnaws at you even when nobody else knows you've done wrong. Westerners score relatively highly for it. People in East Asian societies tend to have a less developed sense of guilt. Instead, they feel bad for having done wrong to the extent they are shamed and shunned by the surrounding society (loss of face). For things like cheating on tests it's easy to see how it's more difficult to maintain standards by shaming mechanisms.