Bad Behavior is Contagious: New Study Reveals How “Bad Actors” Can Destabilize Society
On a standard highway, most drivers—even those slightly exceeding the speed limit—adhere to an unwritten code of conduct. Yet, it only takes a few drivers blazing past at high speeds to shift the temperament of the road. According to new research published October 21 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, this phenomenon is more than just a traffic nuisance; it is a fundamental window into how social structures collapse.
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam suggest that a small percentage of deviant individuals possess the power to “take off the guardrails of the group,” potentially triggering a broader societal breakdown.
To test this, psychologist Lucas Molleman and his team conducted a high-stakes experiment involving 750 U.S. participants, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Participants were asked to identify the brightest square in a row, with a financial incentive provided for choosing squares further to the right. While the “correct” answer was always in the middle, the “profitable” answer was the furthest square to the right.
The team found that while social cues from rule-followers had little impact on group behavior, rule-breaking was highly contagious. When participants were told that a member of their own political party had cheated for profit, they were significantly more likely to follow suit. Initially, without social context, participants chose the most lucrative square about 23 percent of the time. Once exposed to the behavior of a “political comrade” who chose the rightmost square, that number jumped to nearly 40 percent.
The most concerning discovery was the existence of a small subset of “escalators.” While most people mirrored or stayed below the level of deviance they witnessed, roughly 4 percent of participants actively pushed the boundaries further than their predecessors.
Using computer simulations to model these interactions, the researchers projected what happens when these escalation-prone individuals are placed within groups. The simulations revealed that these few bad actors could push an entire collective toward widespread rule-breaking. The only factor keeping the group from total chaos was the presence of a sufficient number of dedicated, consistent rule-followers.
The findings offer a stark warning about how quickly civil norms can erode. Molleman notes that the research provides a foundation for understanding everything from collective traffic violations to the way peaceful protests can escalate into violence.
However, some experts urge caution in applying these lab results to the real world. Behavioral economist Eugen Dimant of the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study, noted that the experiment lacks the real-world deterrents—such as legal consequences and social stigma—that typically govern behavior. “This provides some keen insights into how humans might behave absent consequences,” Dimant said. “But that’s not how the world works.”
Molleman acknowledges the complexity of reality but insists that the “fundamental science” remains clear: when bad behavior is normalized by peers, it takes very few individuals to steer a group toward disorder.
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