From politicians taking bribes to bullying and harassment in City firms, leaders have been quick to label those who break the rules as the odd “bad apple”. But new research backs up the idiom that one bad apple can spoil the barrel.
Researchers have found that when people go beyond the rule-breaking they see in others, general compliance can swiftly turn into widespread rule-breaking.
Dr Lucas Molleman, from the University of Amsterdam and the first author of the research, said the goal was to explore how individuals make decisions about rule-breaking in a social context.
“Many people think of themselves as making sort of autonomous decisions, especially in these individualist cultures that we are from, like Netherlands, the UK,” he said. “But in actual fact, in many, many cases we are very much influenced by what others are doing.”
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Molleman and colleagues report how they recruited 750 people in the US to take part in an online experiment, with the participants approximately evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.
The researchers asked each participant to complete an online task in which they saw an animated “shooting star” moving across a row of 100 squares as its intensity varied. Participants were instructed to pick the square that lit up most intensely to receive a monetary reward.
However, participants received greater rewards for selecting squares further to the right of the correct square, and smaller rewards for selecting squares further to the left.
Participants were then shown whether another participant had followed the rules or broken them, the extent of any rule-breaking, and their political affiliation, and asked if they wished to update their choice. The process was repeated six times.
The results revealed participants showed large degrees of rule-breaking even in their initial choices, with 23% of choices involving squares with the highest reward.
However, the choices of others mattered: seeing others following the rules slightly reduced an individual’s rule-breaking, while seeing others making small beneficial violations – choosing a square a third of the way to the right, beyond the correct square – slightly increased rule-breaking.
Crucially, seeing others flagrantly flout the rules by selecting a square even further to the right led participants to greatly increase their own level of rule-breaking. In some cases they went beyond the violations they had observed.
The team say the findings were stronger when a participant had the same political leanings as others – something Molleman said chimed with other research, suggesting people who are politically aligned are more influenced by each other.
The researchers used computer simulations to explore how the behaviour they had observed in the experiments would play out in a large group. The results showed that a situation could quickly get out of hand.
“A minority of escalating individuals, exceeding the rule violations they observe, they might cause a whole collective to spin out of control,” Molleman said.
However, he noted that about a third of participants consistently followed the rules even though it did not lead to the largest reward.
Prof Stephen Reicher, of the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, who was not involved in the work, said the study had limitations, including that the experiment was abstract and there was no penalty for rule-breaking, meaning the relevance of the work to real-world examples remained unproven.
Reicher also stressed that the results went against the concept of contagion, instead showing that whether we are influenced by others depends on who those others are.
“This is important because it implies that, say, we don’t riot simply because we see others rioting,” he said. “In fact, many people who see rioting respond by helping clear up after riots.”
