Group identity and peer effects in rule‐following

Social life is governed by a myriad of rules but the behavioral logic of why people follow rules is only incompletely understood. Here, we investigate how rule following is influenced by other people and social proximity to them. In particular, we are interested in the identity composition of an individual’s observed peer group: does it matter whether a rule breaker is an ingroup or an outgroup member? To investigate this question, we use a novel abstract rule-following task with strong incentives to break the rule. We call our rule-following task the “Y task” because the rule requested participants (n=7,033 Prolific workers) to take one of the two diverging paths of a Y-shaped maze. Consistent with previous research, we show that examples of rule violations trigger further rule violations, even though overall rule compliance remains high. Contrary to our hypotheses, and research on honesty and cooperation, we do not find that group identity moderates the influence of peer compliance on people’s willingness to follow rules. We conclude that rule breaking is contagious regardless of the ingroup or outgroup status of the rule breaker.