This Is How To Be a Rule Breaker.

Violating rules comes with cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. Here, we probed for means to reduce the behavioral effects of this conflict by studying the combined impact of recency and frequency of rule violations. We found that violating a rule facilitated the initiation of a subsequent rule violation, while notable costs relative to rule-based responding remained in measures of response execution. Such costs during response execution vanished, however, when frequency and recency of rule violation worked in concert. That is, it is possible to overcome the costs of rule violation when (a) having violated this particular rule frequently and (b) having violated this particular rule very recently. Moreover, we demonstrated that recent rule violations reduce the costs of cognitive conflict in an unrelated interference task (Simon task). Based on these findings, we present a revised model of the cognitive processes underlying deliberate rule violations.