This reminds me of a great study about the relationship between cultural and legal norms in looking at corruption. Because of the UN, nearly every country has a diplomat in New York, and because of diplomatic immunity, none of them are responsible for their parking tickets. So you effectively had to rely on their own cultural norms about how to behave with your car, rather than legal enforcement. They found that there was a strong correlation between the number of parking tickets issued to diplomats from a country and independent measures of corruption in that country, showing that the norms really were an important part, and carried over even into a different environment.

You can find the whole paper here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12312