Determinants of Rule-Breaking in Adolescence

Learning to navigate the many rules that regulate behavior in the adult world is a key developmental goal in adolescence. Yet, adolescents are notorious rule-breakers. In this paper, we use behavioral experiments to examine how adolescent rule-breaking is impacted by situational ambiguity and social influence.

Younger (11-15 year-olds, N = 296) and older adolescents (16-19 year-olds, N = 333) recruited from high schools in the Netherlands (44% male, 54% female, 2% other) completed incentivized tasks. Each task involved a red traffic light, and participants were told that the rule was to wait until it turned green. However, by breaking the rule and crossing before the green light, they could increase their rewards. The tasks varied in two factors: situational ambiguity (a yellow light appearing before green) and peer behavior (observing peers either following or breaking the rule).

Adolescents' rule-breaking is highly sensitive to ambiguity and peer influence. Rule-breaking strongly increases when there is wiggle room to interpret a situation in self-serving ways, and when observing rule-breaking by peers. The magnitude of these effects does not differ between younger and older adolescents, but overall, older adolescents tend to break the rule more often than younger adolescents. Moreover, older adolescents' injunctive norms change more in response to others' behavior. Exploratory analyses indicate that boys break the rule more often and that girls are substantially more sensitive to peer influence than boys.

Our experimental results indicate that interventions aimed at curbing adolescents' rule-breaking may benefit from reducing situational ambiguity and promoting exposure to positive peer behavior.