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Rules are central to the successful coordination of large-scale societies. However, official codified rules (like laws) and other important social information like descriptive (often implicit) norms can sometimes provide conflicting accounts of what someone should do. Here, we explored two situations in which official rules and descriptive norms conflict—with implications for enforcement and punishment. Experiment 1 looked in the US and Belgium and found that descriptive norms shape the extent to which violating a codified rule is seen as actually breaking a rule. In Experiment 2 we demonstrated that descriptive norms also influence who people think was the cause of a punishment—the rule enforcer, not the rule breaker, is seen as the cause when the rule is rarely enforced (i.e. descriptive norms of enforcement are low.) Overall, this work suggests that norms play a vital role in shaping how we understand official rules and those who break them.

Morality is a critical aspect of life––it influences how we think, design systems, and even the stories we tell. Looking to the popularity of true crime stories and characters like Dexter Morgan, it seems that our preferences are toward exploring moral ambiguity and moral badness. Across two experiments, we examine what moral ambiguity is and what kinds of moral information spark curiosity and explanation-seeking. In Experiment 1, we manipulate moral ambiguity to mean someone with conflicting moral character, and we predict those individuals will trigger curiosity more than morally consistent people. Results suggest that both morally ambiguous and immoral minds pique curiosity for explanations. In Experiment 2, we find that when ambiguity is instead operationalized as what is typical or average, we are curious about morally deviant things. This research points to critical differences in the kinds of moral minds we are curious to learn more about.