Quarter of people follow rules even with no downside to breaking them
Why do we follow rules? A series of experiments with more than 14,000 people reveals that around a quarter of us will follow rules unconditionally, even if obeying them harms us and there is no downside to breaking them
By Helen Thomson
3 June 2025
Break the rules, or fall in line?
Meizhi Lang/Unsplash
Would you follow a rule, even if doing so harms you and no one would know if you broke it? A series of experiments suggests that 1 in 4 people do exactly that: obey rules unconditionally, even in the absence of social pressure, punishment and personal gain. The results challenge traditional economic theories, which assume that rule-following is driven largely by extrinsic incentives, and could reshape how we design new laws.
“Following or breaking rules is what human social behaviour often amounts to,” says Simon Gaechter at the University of Nottingham, UK, but researchers disagree on why we do so. “Economists tend to emphasise extrinsic incentives, and other social scientists stress the importance of conformity.”
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Motivated to create some unity, Gaechter and his colleagues created a variety of simple computer tasks in which more than 14,000 people were told to move a circle to a red traffic light, wait until it turned green, and then reach a finish line as quickly as possible to maximise their reward.
In each test, participants started with $20 but the reward fell by $1 per second, so breaking the rules by not waiting for the green light would mean more money. Yet despite participants being told their actions were anonymous and no one would be watching what they did, around 70 per cent of people still followed the rule, waiting for the traffic light to turn green before proceeding.
Even when the researchers pointed out the potential gain from breaking the rule, the majority of people still complied. “There was no social pressure, it was anonymous, there was absolutely no reason to follow the rule, nevertheless, almost 60 per cent of people followed it,” says Gaechter.
