Researchers from the University of Amsterdam conducted an experiment involving 750 American participants to examine how social context influences decisions about rule-breaking. The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, used an online task where participants selected squares on a grid to earn monetary rewards, with greater financial incentives for choosing squares further from the correct answer.
Participants observed whether other individuals followed or violated the rules before making their own choices across six repeated rounds. The experiment revealed that baseline rule-breaking was common, with approximately 23% of initial choices selecting the highest-reward option. Importantly, observing others’ behavior significantly influenced participants’ subsequent decisions. When participants saw others following rules, their own rule-breaking decreased slightly. However, exposure to others making small rule violations increased individual rule-breaking, and witnessing flagrant rule violations led to substantially greater increases in participants’ own violations.
The research team noted that these effects were amplified when participants shared political affiliation with those they observed, aligning with existing findings about political homogeneity influencing behavior. Computer simulations modeling how observed patterns would scale in larger groups suggested scenarios could rapidly escalate, with a minority of escalating rule-breakers potentially causing widespread violation across entire collectives.
Despite the findings, approximately one-third of participants consistently adhered to rules even when doing so yielded smaller rewards. An external expert noted the study had limitations, including its abstract nature and absence of penalties for rule-breaking, which may limit applicability to real-world contexts. The expert also emphasized that the results suggest influence depends on the identity of those observed rather than simple contagion effects.
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