PONE-D-22-11962Taking the chance! – Interindividual differences in rule-breakingPLOS ONE

Dear Dr.  Cubillos-Pinilla,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

As you can see below, one of the reviewers is more enthusiastic about the results than the other. Please, go through the comments of both reviewers and try to answer their points accurately. If you refrain from following a suggestion, please explain why you decided that way.

Please submit your revised manuscript by 6-09-2022  . If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Jaume Garcia-Segarra

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

3. Please ensure that you include a title page within your main document. We do appreciate that you have a title page document uploaded as a separate file, however, as per our author guidelines (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-title-page) we do require this to be part of the manuscript file itself and not uploaded separately.

Could you therefore please include the title page into the beginning of your manuscript file itself, listing all authors and affiliations.

4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: 

"This work was supported by the funding of European Commission under the MARIE SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE ACTIONS Individual Fellowships (IF) grant, Call: H2020-MSCA-IF-2017."

We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. 

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: 

"FE (Dr. Franziska Emmerling)

MARIE SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE ACTIONS Individual Fellowships (IF) grant, Call: H2020-MSCA-IF-2017

Link: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/msca-if-2017

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

5. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The manuscript entitled “Taking the chance! – Interindividual differences in rule-breaking”. This manuscript investigates the cognitive characteristics of individuals who commit spontaneous deliberative rule-breaking (rule-breakers) versus rule-followers.

This is a topic of great interest and little studied, for which the authors are congratulated. In addition, the authors are congratulated because they have made a very adequate theoretical exposition of the topic (the authors are congratulated specifically for the explanation of cognitive conflict and the ways to measure it), methodologically it is a well-done job, the data analysis is correct, and the conclusions are of interest.

However, all work can be improved, so this reviewer wishes to point out a series of issues that can improve the manuscript:

1 Introduction:

I think that the meaning of the norm concept should be broadened. I think it would be interesting to distinguish between norms in general, social norms. legal norms and moral norms.

There is a concept, that of the perverse norm, which I think should at least be mentioned. See, for example, Oceja, L.V., and Fernandez-Dols, J.M.

I think that when dealing with the issue of breaking norms, it should be linked to that of psychological reactance. This perspective can be linked with antisocial behavior.

I think the cultural dimension should be taken into account. There are cultures in which social norms are more respected, and cultures in which they are less respected. I do not know bibliography about it, but if there is it would be interesting to mention this fact. Perhaps this distinguishes individualistic from collectivist cultures (studies by Hofstede, Schwartz, etc.)

1.1. Interindividual differences in rule-breaking

One could refer to the law as a coercive element of socialization.

The difficulty of studying rule-breaking within one individual is established, and it is true. But it should be insisted that it is another line of research, and that respect for some rules and breaking of others occur simultaneously in all subjects. This aspect should also be included in the limitations of the study.

The above shows, by exposing an intra-individual vision (cognitive aspects) that it would be logical to approach an intra-individual perspective.

1.4 DIMI Model (Decision-Implementation-Mandatory switch-Inhibition)

This model shows that the same subject can choose to skip the rules at a given time or follow them, that is, it serves to explain an intra-individual decision-making, and also allows determining the existence of two groups of subjects. It should be explained why this intra-individual perspective is not adopted.

1.5 Personality in rule-breakers and rule-followers

I think that works should be found that refer to impulsiveness.

2.1.

Better put participants

The median age is young teens (Mage = 25. SDage = 7); must be recognized in the limitations.

Questionnaires: Questionnaires: why those? Expand information on each questionnaire, put reliability and validity data from other studies, and at least reliability in this sample. Why use the Narcissism NPI quiz and not use a Dark Personality quiz in general? The Big Five is a very long questionnaire and is rarely used at work; Why this quiz?

Data analysis: specify the version of SPSS used.

RESULTS

3.1 Classification of rule-breakers versus rule-followers. How is it possible that the first quartile groups more or less half of the subjects, and the other three quartiles another half? I consider it statistically impossible. Furthermore, wouldn't it be better to create two extreme groups, the subjects that are grouped in the first quartile (rule breakers) versus those in the fourth quartile (rule followers)?

The title of the Tables must be placed at the top of the Tables, not at the bottom. In addition, “Note” must be added and the meaning of abbreviations must be specified, such as SD, Std. Error,*, **, etc.

The results referring to questionnaires should be accompanied by the respective Tables. It gives the impression that this part is not considered relevant.

DISCUSSION

The results are claimed to confirm the DIMI model, but I think a more detailed explanation is needed. I believe that the explanation that is elaborated does not coincide with the hypotheses that were specified before carrying out the investigation.

I think that the discussion should refer to all the variables of the study. What has happened, for example, with the Big Five variables? And with the NPI test?

Reviewer #2: Overall, the paper is well written. The research gap is well explained in the introduction, and the hypothesis are clear and interesting. The experiment and analyses seem to be well conducted. Some clarifications are required before the paper can be accepted, but these can probably be well addressed in a revision.

In 1.5, the authors list personality traits that are typically found to be related to rule-breaking. I was a bit surprised that some obvious characteristics such as narcissism, impulsiveness, honesty or Machiavellianism were not mentioned. Narcissism was then assessed in the study. A reference should also be added for narcissism in 1.5, or are there no previous studies about this? I would also appreciate if the authors briefly define the assessed concepts (narcissism, inhibition etc.) and explain why these concepts are related to rule-breaking.

Rule-breaking is of special interest during COVID-19 (e.g., not wearing masks, not going into quarantaine after being tested positive), and studying individual differences in adherence to infection mitigation measures is thus of great importance. The authors included some references that studied rule-breaking in the context of COVID-19 (Carvalho et al., Dong et al., Nofal et al., O’Connell et al., Oosterhoff et al.). However, the authors do not make an explicit link between rule-breaking and adherence to preventive measures. I think the authors can increase the impact of their paper when they make this link more explicitly in the text (at least when discussing the general relevance in the discussion section), and maybe also link their results to other studies that analyzed individual differences in adherence/non-adherence to COVID-19 preventive measures (e.g., Hartmann, M., & Müller, P. (2022). Acceptance and Adherence to COVID-19 Preventive Measures are Shaped Predominantly by Conspiracy Beliefs, Mistrust in Science and Fear–A Comparison of More than 20 Psychological Variables. Psychological reports, 00332941211073656; Šrol, J., Ballová Mikušková, E., & Čavojová, V. (2021). When we are worried, what are we thinking? Anxiety, lack of control, and conspiracy beliefs amidst the COVID‐19 pandemic. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 35(3), 720–729). For example, Hartmann and Müller also reported correlations between norm compliance and various personality traits (e.g., neuroticism, extraversion, anxiety, intuitive thinking).

1.6, goal 4: the authors wrote that they will investigate the relationship between personality, behavior, and cognitive processes. It should be mentioned more precisely how it is planned to analyze this, e.g., which parameters of the mouse trajectory are planned to be correlated with which personality traits? Also in the method section this should be specified more precisely. For example, if all possible mouse trajectory parameters are correlated with about 8 possible personality traits, there is a big number of tests and the problem of false positive detection (alpha-cumulation) occurs, it should be mentioned in the method section how many tests are conducted and if/how tests are corrected for multiple comparison. As I can see from the supplemental material, around 60 correlations have been computed. The problem of alpha cumulation should at least be mentioned somewhere.

p. 16: it is a bit unusual that only the first quartile (25%) is classified as rule-breaker and compared to the rest. Are the results different when a median split is used, or when the first quartile is compared only to the fourth quartile? Maybe I misunderstood this, because on p. 16 it is written that about 49.2% of participants were classified as rule-breakers. Please clarify.

2.4 data analys -> it should be described in more details which mouse tracking parameters are computed and how this is done (e.g., outlier trajectories can have a great impact on average trajectories – how is this controlled?)

For the questionnaires, I did not understand why the correlations are computed separately for rule-followers and rule-breakers. Doesn’t it make more sense to consider this as a continuum, or respectively to try to predict rule-followers and rule-breakers by the personality traits by means of logistic regressions? Relatedly, I understand that you added the correlation table in the supplemental materials, but since these data is essential for some of your hypothesis, I would appreciate to see (some of the) correlational results also in the main document.

p. 3 “this gap is part rooted” -> partly

p. 12 technical specificities: 75Hz was the refresh rate of the monitor, was this also the tracking rate for the mouse? Which mouse was used?

p. 15 I am wondering whether 7 trials for the neutral condition are enough to create a valid average mouse trajectory.

Results. The figure with mouse trajectory of rule-breakers vs. rule-followers should be included in the main document (not supplementary material). Also, in Figure 2, please add a legend for yellow = X and pink = Y in the Figure.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Miguel Clemente

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Taking the chance! – Interindividual differences in rule-breaking

PONE-D-22-11962R1

Dear Dr. Cubillos-Pinilla,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Jaume Garcia-Segarra

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No

**********