Breaking rules for moral reasons: Development and validation of the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) scale.

Objective: 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 respectively predict prosocial and antisocial cheating behavior.Method: We developed the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) Scale using a sample of 497 undergraduates (Study 1) and 257 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers (Study 2).Participants completed all surveys (Studies 1 and 2) and took part in a betweensubjects 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 (CFI = .96,TLI = .93,RMSEA = .064;χ² = 177, df = 88, p < .001),with the prosocial (α = .81)and antisocial (α = .93)subscales showing good reliability.Prosocial rule-breaking was positively associated with prosocial intentions, empathy, and guilt proneness, whereas antisocial rulebreaking 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).Conclusion: 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.