ArticlePersonality & social psychology bulletin2021
Rule Following Mitigates Collaborative Cheating and Facilitates the Spreading of Honesty Within Groups.
Article in Personality & social psychology bulletin, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Seeing Through the Fog: The Ability to Resolve Ambiguity Reduces Dishonesty.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2026Article
- Interpretable machine learning with SHAP predicts honest behavior from personality traits and physiological data.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Determinants of Rule-Breaking in Adolescence.Journal of adolescence · 2025Article
- Why people follow rules.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Prosocial preferences can escalate intergroup conflicts by countering selfish motivations to leave.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Group Formation and the Evolution of Human Social Organization.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Commitment to honesty oaths decreases dishonesty, but commitment to another individual does not affect dishonesty.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Perceptions of Ethicality: The Role of Attire Style, Attire Appropriateness, and Context.Journal of business ethics : JBE · 2023Article
- Article
- Bad machines corrupt good morals.Nature human behaviour · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Compared with working alone, interacting in groups can increase dishonesty and give rise to collaborative cheating-the joint violation of honesty. At the same time, collaborative cheating emerges some but not all of the time, even when dishonesty is not sanctioned and economically rational. Here, we address this conundrum. We show that people differ in their extent to follow arbitrary and costly rules and observe that "rule-followers" behave more honestly than "rule-violators." Because rule-followers also resist the temptation to engage in collaborative cheating, dyads and groups with at least one high rule-follower have fewer instances of coordinated violations of honesty. Whereas social interaction can lead to a "social slippery slope" of increased cheating, rule-abiding individuals mitigate the emergence and spreading of collaborative cheating, leading to a transmission advantage of honesty. Accordingly, interindividual differences in rule following provide a basis through which honest behavior can persist.
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Registered trials
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