The Rule Applies to Everyone Except, Apparently, You

Nobody thinks of themselves as a rule-breaker. The person who speeds thinks of themselves as someone with places to be. The person who cuts the line thinks of themselves as someone with a good enough reason. Research on why people break rules keeps finding the same pattern: violators very rarely experience it as breaking a rule. They experience it as being a justified exception to one.

It shows up small: parking in the fire lane “just for a minute,” not paying for something small because “it’s not a big deal,” walking past a posted policy because “this obviously doesn’t apply to my situation.” Each one feels reasonable in isolation. Nobody ever thinks of themselves as the reason the sign had to go up in the first place.

Rules exist because most people, on average, can’t be trusted to self-regulate — that’s not an insult, it’s the entire reason rules get written down instead of left to good judgment. And the person most annoyed by a given rule is very often the person who most needs it, precisely because they’re the one most tempted to treat themselves as the exception.

The discomfort of “this rule is inconvenient for me right now” is not evidence that the rule is wrong. It’s just evidence that it’s a rule.

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