Group identity and peer effects in rule-following

IF 2.3 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Pub Date : 2025-10-01 DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107264

Cristina Bicchieri , Simon Gächter , Lucas Molleman , Daniele Nosenzo

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

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.

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规则遵循中的群体认同和同伴效应

社会生活受到无数规则的支配，但人们为什么遵守规则的行为逻辑只是不完全理解。在这里，我们调查规则遵循是如何受到其他人和社会接近度的影响的。特别是，我们对观察到的个体同伴群体的身份构成感兴趣：违反规则者是内群体成员还是外群体成员有关系吗？为了研究这个问题，我们使用了一个新颖的抽象规则遵循任务，该任务具有打破规则的强烈动机。我们将遵循规则的任务称为“Y任务”，因为该规则要求参与者（n= 7033名高产员工）在Y形迷宫的两条不同路径中选择一条。与之前的研究一致，我们表明违反规则的例子引发了进一步的违反规则，即使总体规则遵从性仍然很高。与我们的假设以及对诚实和合作的研究相反，我们没有发现群体认同会调节同伴顺从对人们遵守规则意愿的影响。我们的结论是，违反规则是具有传染性的，无论违反规则者的群体内或群体外地位如何。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

3.80

自引率

9.10%

发文量

392

期刊介绍： The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization is devoted to theoretical and empirical research concerning economic decision, organization and behavior and to economic change in all its aspects. Its specific purposes are to foster an improved understanding of how human cognitive, computational and informational characteristics influence the working of economic organizations and market economies and how an economy structural features lead to various types of micro and macro behavior, to changing patterns of development and to institutional evolution. Research with these purposes that explore the interrelations of economics with other disciplines such as biology, psychology, law, anthropology, sociology and mathematics is particularly welcome.