CeDEx Seminar - Lucas Molleman (University of Amsterdam)

Contagion and escalation of rule violations

The smooth functioning of societies depends on individuals adhering to rules that regulate their behaviour. However, collective compliance can be fragile when rules are not enforced and when others are seen breaking them. Most prior research treats rule-following as a binary choice, whereas in reality, deviations from rules often fall along a continuum from full compliance to minor and major violations. Capturing this continuum is essential for understanding how disorder can spread as individuals gradually escalate the violations of others; a perspective we adopt in this paper. Here, we first present simulations showing that rule compliance can unravel through social influence, especially when observing minor violations encourages people to commit more severe ones. This escalating behaviour can trigger a slippery slope toward collective rule breaking in which everyone disregards the rule. We then report a decision-making experiment with 750 participants, showing that observing someone fully comply with a rule has little effect on curbing violations. By contrast, observing major violations substantially increases them, particularly when committed by someone who is socially close. Observing minor violations prompts many participants to follow suit, and some individuals to escalate beyond the violations they observe. Finally, parameterizing our simulations based on the experimental results reveals that such a minority of escalators can markedly undermine collective compliance. Our results highlight asymmetries in the contagiousness of socially desirable versus undesirable behaviour, and reveal how individuals’ escalatory responses to minor violations can scale up to collective rule breaking.