Rolf Degen summarizes... Large parts of our life are governed by "phantom rules", flexible clauses whose violation we only find offensive when we see fit

Wylie, Jordan, and Ana P. Gantman. 2020. “Doesn’t Everybody Jaywalk? On the Motivated Enforcement of Frequently Violated Rules.” PsyArXiv. September 21. doi:10.31234/osf.io/yfsed

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1308255026767372288

Abstract: We propose the existence of a subclass of explicitly codified rules— phantom rules—whose violations are frequent, and whose enforcement is motivated (e.g., jaywalking). These rules differ from other rules (e.g., no traveling in basketball) and laws (e.g., theft) because they do not appear legitimate. Across three experiments, we recruited U.S. participants from Amazon MechanicalTurk and Prolific (N = 464) and validated each feature of our definition. In Experiment 1, participants classified phantom rules as illegal and frequent. In Experiment 2, we found that phantom rules (vs. social norms) are more morally acceptable, but more justifiably punished, allowing for the motivated enforcement found in Experiment 3. We hypothesized and found people judge phantom rule violations to be more justifiably enforced when they were already motivated to punish. Phantom rule violations are judged to be morally worse and more justifiably punished when the person who violated the phantom rule also violated a social norm (vs. phantom rule violation alone). Phantom rules are codified rules, frequently violated, and enforced in a motivated manner.