Deliberate rule violations have typically been addressed from a motivational perspective that
asked whether or not agents decide to violate rules based on contextual factors and moral considerations.
Here we complement motivational approaches by providing a cognitive perspective
on the processes that operate during the act of committing an unsolicited rule violation.
Participants were tested in a task that allowed for violating traffic rules by exploiting forbidden
shortcuts in a virtual city maze. Results yielded evidence for sustained cognitive conflict that
affected performance from right before a violation throughout actually committing the violation.
These findings open up a new theoretical perspective on violation behavior that focuses on
processes occurring right at the moment a rule violation takes place