Rule Governance: Implications for Practice and Rule Fidelity Across Four Generations

Abstract

The present study examined relations between obeying a rule (putting a rule into practice) versus transmitting the rule without practice across generations of participants. Undergraduates (N=96), composed of eight groups, four Practice and four No Practice, demonstrated that practice contributes significantly to rule fidelity across generations. After four generations of rule transmission, participants without practice but exposed to traditional instruction-based learning, more slowly and less persistently followed the original rule than those with practice – apparently due to a loss of information across No Practice generations. That is, due to an absence of experiential learning, participants without practice apparently lost components of the instructions needed to effectively complete the task. The present results indicate that putting instructions into practice may be a useful training method for organizations, institutions, or research that requires accurate informational transfer from individual to individual.