People will buy non-cooperative rules

Institutional rules enable large-scale human coordination, allowing strangers to cooperate by adhering to official rules that apply to all. Yet not all rules serve these cooperative ends. Why do they persist? Across three pre-registered experiments in the United States and China (N = 1610) players could buy rules in a Dictator Game. Even when the rules available for purchase did not serve cooperative ends, nearly half of U.S. participants (Study 1) and two-thirds of the Chinese participants (Study 2) bought at least one rule—more than the 33% that a separate sample of Americans forecasted would be willing to pay, and despite judging them to be of little utility. Both preferences for obedience (in the United States and China) and support for anti-democratic practices (United States) predicted “non-cooperative” rule purchasing, a phenomenon specific to non-cooperative rules as preferences for obedience predicted buying “non-cooperative” but not cooperative rules (Study 3).