How Rules Benders (and Breakers?) Rise to Power: The Role of Dominance and Prestige

Rules and regulations play an important role in creating and maintaining well-functioning societies. Given the importance of rules, observers make social judgments of others depending on how they handle rules. More specifically, we argue that the way in which individuals deal with rules signals information regarding their social standing, including their leadership appeal. To enhance understanding of people’s responses to (counter)normative behavior, we introduce the concept of rule bending—behavior that infringes a rule without technically breaking it—and compare people’s responses to rule benders to responses to rule abiders and breakers. Drawing on the dominance/prestige framework of social rank, we illuminate the underlying processes that drive responses to rule behaviors in cooperative and competitive settings. We propose that those who break rules signal dominance, but not prestige, as they engage in punishable behavior. This is not likely to result in leadership granting, except when dominance is seen as useful for the group, which is more likely in competitive settings. Conversely, rule benders will be seen as both dominant and prestigious, as they are able to find a way around a rule without doing something that could be punished. For norm abiders we predict that they would be seen as mostly prestigious, which would in general be related to leadership granting, especially in more cooperative settings. Data from two experiments (Study 1: N=149; Study 2: N=480, preregistered) show that rule benders are indeed seen as relatively high on both prestige and dominance, which renders them more attractive as leaders than rule breakers. We also show that the attractiveness of those who do not abide by rules as leaders increases under competition when their apparent dominance becomes an asset. We discuss how rule bending relates to rule abiding and rule breaking and consider implications for understanding and managing rule-bending behavior.