Alice is an hour into her three hour flight and she has to pee. The seat belt light is on, and the flight crew has made an announcement reminding everyone that they are not to leave their seats. In spite of this, several passengers have left their seats to use the lavatory in the past twenty minutes. She is reluctant to get up because she does not want to flaunt the rules, especially when they are there for safety, but eventually the discomfort is unbearable so she heads to the lavatory. The flight attendant at the rear of the plane smiles at her and says nothing.
Bob enters a parking lot with a posted speed limit of 5mph. He initially sticks to this speed, but it feels unreasonably slow and traffic is backing up behind him. He accelerates to 9mph until he finds an open spot, still feeling that he is driving slower than is necessary or expected.
Cathy is reviewing the lease for her new apartment. There is a clause saying she is not allowed to take her bike in the elevator or through the main lobby. Not being able to easily get her bike in and out of her apartment is a deal breaker for her, so she calls the leasing office to ask about it. The leasing agent laughs and says that’s just a standard part of a lease, and of course she can take her bike in the elevator if she wants to.
Many rules are not intended to be followed. Traffic engineers in the US often do not choose speed limits with the idea that most drivers will stay within them. They choose speed limits lower than the desired speed of traffic, with the intent that drivers will go 5-20mph faster, and police will not ticket based on the posted speed limit, but rather based on some other set of criteria. Residential leases contain all manner of rules that are only there to be selectively enforced in rare cases when convenient for the landlord. According to my lease, I am not allowed to take my bike in the elevator, have less than 70% of my floor covered by furniture or rugs, or have any guests over without informing them of all the rules associated with being at the complex. I have broken all of these rules and I expect that if I apologized to management for breaking them they would kindly tell me to not worry about it then go home to tell their friends about the weird tenant who thought he actually had to do all the stuff in his lease.
I think this is bad. Rules should be flexible and open to interpretation and revision. We should never follow them off cliffs or do anything we think is wrong just to follow them. But rules should at minimum be things that are intended to be followed. This is especially the case for rules about things with high stakes (like safety) or rules which have teeth (like contracts). I see several problems with making rules with the assumption that they will not be followed or enforced.
First, rules built around selective enforcement lend themselves to abuse and discrimination. The classic case of this is traffic violations being used as excuses to stop, harass, and arrest people for reasons entirely unrelated to traffic safety. I am generally an unusually compliant driver. I actually stop at stop signs, I use my turn signal ahead of a turn, I follow the speed limit, and I avoid changing lanes across solid white lines. But I have no doubt that I regularly break rules, mostly by accident or necessity. It is almost impossible to drive in an entirely violation-free way, because the intent is not for all of the rules to be followed. If a police officer wants to pull me over, they will in most circumstances not have to follow me for very long before they have an excuse to do so. Similarly, I have seen bus drivers yell at homeless people for doing something that moments before I was doing without them saying a word.
Second, in an environment with many such rules, people tend to take all rules less seriously. As far as I can tell, the only rules of driving that people actually follow consistently in California are stopping at red lights and not colliding with things. I do not think the traffic code is written with the idea that we’ll have a big list of very precise rules, but people will just do whatever they feel like while driving, but this is the outcome. In my apartment complex, I consistently smell cigarette smoke and hear noises in ways that I have a difficult time imagining would happen if people actually followed the rules about cigarettes and noise. I find this irritating, but in some ways I don’t blame people. Our leases are so full of requirements that are obviously not supposed to be taken seriously, that it is hard to know which ones to follow.
Finally, rules that are only enforced in exceptional circumstances harm people that are at a disadvantage in navigating social situations. People who are not as able to figure out when and in what ways they can break the rules or how to smooth things over when they make a mistake will incur costs by needlessly following the rules or by breaking the wrong ones. These costs range from bladder discomfort on an airplane to carrying a bike up and down several flights of stairs to getting a speeding ticket by speeding in one of the three stretches of freeway in California where the speed limit is strictly enforced. The most common situation where someone is at such a disadvantage is someone who is new to a particular situation, like someone who is visiting a country for the first time or flying on an airplane for the first time. Another case is someone who is not as adept at solving social puzzles intuitively, like many people who are very young or on the autism spectrum. Because of this, I think many of these kinds of rules are somewhat classist and ableist, at least in terms of impact and sometimes in intent. There are already enough unspoken rules for people to sort out. We can at least have our written rules be clear.
Underconfidence 