Rule-violations sensitise towards negative and authority-related stimuli

ABSTRACT

Rule violations have usually been studied from a third-person perspective, identifying situational factors that render violations more or less likely. A first-person perspective of the agent that actively violates the rules, on the other hand, is only just beginning to emerge. Here we show that committing a rule violation sensitises towards subsequent negative stimuli as well as subsequent authority-related stimuli. In a Prime-Probe design, we used an instructed rule-violation task as the Prime and a word categorisation task as the Probe. Also, we employed a control condition that used a rule inversion task as the Prime (instead of rule violations). Probe targets were categorised faster after a violation relative to after a rule-based response if they related to either, negative valence or authority. Inversions, however, primed only negative stimuli and did not accelerate the categorisation of authority-related stimuli. A heightened sensitivity towards authority-related targets thus seems to be specific to rule violations. A control experiment showed that these effects cannot be explained in terms of semantic priming. Therefore, we propose that rule violations necessarily activate authority-related representations that make rule violations qualitatively different from simple rule inversions.

KEYWORDS:

• Rule violation
• non-conformity
• conflict
• aversive signal
• authority

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We thank two anonymous reviewers for raising this alternative explanation.

2. Even though there was no Prime response in Experiment 2, we still abbreviate Probe response times as RT2 to remain consistent with the terminology of Experiment 1.