Breaking Rules for Moral Reasons: Development and Validation of the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) Scale

Public Significance Statement Defining rule-breaking as antisocial behavior fails to explain rule-breaking that is motivated by prosocial intentions (e.g., clashing with police over racial injustice, whistleblowing, hiding Jewish families during the Holocaust). The PARB scale shows that prosocial rule-breaking differs from antisocial rule-breaking across a variety of moral dimensions. The PARB scale calls into question the idea that all rule breakers are antisocial, giving researchers, forensic investigators, judges, and juries greater clarity in assessing the different motivations underlying rule-breaking. Objectives: To determine whether prosocial rule-breaking exists as a separate construct from antisocial rule-breaking and to develop a valid rule-breaking scale with prosocial and antisocial subscales. Hypotheses: We hypothesized that (a) rule-breaking would have prosocial and antisocial subfactors; (b) the prosocial rule-breaking subscale would positively associate with prosocial intentions, empathy, moral identity, and guilt proneness, whereas the antisocial rule-breaking subscale would negatively associate with these same factors; and (c) the two subscales would predict prosocial and antisocial cheating behaviors, respectively. Method: We developed the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) scale using a sample of 497 undergraduates (Study 1) and 257 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (Study 2). Participants completed all surveys (Studies 1 and 2) and took part in a between-subjects experiment (Study 2) in which cheating behavior was measured in two conditions-when cheating helps others (prosocial) or oneself (antisocial). Results: The final PARB scale demonstrated the expected factor structure (comparative fit index = .96, Tucker-Lewis index = .93, root-mean-square error of approximation = .064; chi(2) = 177, df = 88, p < .001), with the prosocial (alpha = .81) and antisocial (alpha = .93) subscales showing good reliability. Prosocial rule-breaking was positively associated with prosocial intentions, empathy, and guilt proneness, whereas antisocial rule-breaking was negatively associated with these same factors. Each additional point in prosocial rule-breaking PARB score predicted a 37% increased likelihood of participating in protest behavior in an exploratory investigation (p = .025) and predicted a 268% increase in actual prosocial cheating behavior (p < .001) but did not predict antisocial cheating behavior (p = .293). Conversely, each additional point in antisocial rule-breaking PARB score did not predict protest participation (p = .410) but did predict a 69% increase in actual antisocial cheating behavior (p = .025). Conclusions: These findings suggest that our current understanding of rule-breaking is limited, as many types of rule-breaking are prosocially motivated and are not necessarily antisocial.