We conducted an experiment in a high-immersive virtual reality environment to study the effect of the presence of a virtual observer on cheating behavior. Participants were placed in a virtual room and played 30 rounds of a cheating game without a chance of their cheating being detected. We varied whether or not a virtual observer (an avatar) was present in the room, and, if so, whether the avatar was actively staring at the decision maker or passively seated in a corner watching his smartphone. This dataset contains: appendix (instructions + informed consent) clean data (cleaned data in stata dta format) code (stata do-files) input (raw data files) output (figures and LaTeX tables)