Two roads to breaking the rules, and they do not meet

There is a comfortable idea that bad behaviour is mostly bad thinking: people break rules because they jump to conclusions, and if they slowed down they would behave better. A study published in the International Journal of Psychology tests that idea and finds it only half right¹.

Janko Mededović and colleagues at the Institute of Criminological and Sociological Research in Belgrade tested 514 adults, most of them university students¹. They measured the four “Dark Tetrad” traits: psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism and sadism. They gave a logic test built to tempt people into quick wrong answers. They asked people how well they thought they had done, and how they compared with the average person on looks, intellect and morals. Then they asked about their own rule-breaking¹.

Both sets of factors mattered. Sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism predicted more self-reported rule-breaking; narcissism did not¹. So did getting more logic questions wrong, and being overconfident about one’s intellect, looks or test score¹. One twist: people who were overconfident about their own morals reported less rule-breaking. People high in the three predictive traits had lower moral overconfidence, which the authors think may reflect some awareness that their values differ from the norm¹.

The finding that matters is the one that did not appear. The researchers expected the dark traits to work through poor reasoning. The path analysis showed no such link: the thinking habits tied to dark traits were mostly different from those tied to rule-breaking¹. The two are, in the authors’ framing, separate pathways¹.

That has a practical point for you, and for anyone who runs a school, a prison programme or a compliance department. Training in careful reasoning and realistic self-assessment may help people whose trouble starts with hasty decisions. It is unlikely to help much where the driver is the personality itself¹. The limits are real: a student sample, one point in time, self-reported misdeeds¹. But the lesson is an old one for institutions. Match the remedy to the cause, and do not expect one course to fix two problems.