Bad Behaviour, Phone-Free Classrooms and the Problem With Resilience
This week in psychology: bad behaviour may be genuinely contagious, taking phones out of classrooms appears to help students learn, and resilience looks rather less like an individual superpower once you examine the circumstances people are actually living in.
Three studies worth knowing about, interpreted without requiring you to spend Friday afternoon reading several hundred pages of journal articles.
Bad Behaviour May Actually Be Contagious
“One bad apple spoils the barrel” is normally the sort of wisdom delivered shortly before somebody explains society using an anecdote about their neighbour.
This time, however, it has some experimental support.
Lucas Molleman and colleagues recruited 750 Americans shortly before the 2024 US presidential election and gave them a deceptively simple task. Participants watched an animated shooting star move across 100 squares and were instructed to select the brightest square.
There was, naturally, a catch.
Choosing squares farther to the right earned more money, creating an incentive to ignore the rule. Participants were then shown how another person had behaved before being allowed to choose again. They were also told whether that person was a Democrat or Republican (Molleman et al., 2026).
Seeing somebody obey the rule did relatively little.
Seeing somebody violate it did.
When participants observed substantial rule-breaking, their own violations increased. The effect was stronger when the rule-breaker shared their political affiliation. A small minority even went further than the violation they had just observed.
The researchers then used computer simulations to explore what might happen when these patterns were allowed to spread through larger groups. Under some conditions, a relatively small number of escalating rule-breakers could push the wider group towards progressively weaker compliance (Molleman et al., 2026).
That does not mean one badly parked car inevitably ends with civilisation eating itself.
The experiment involved an artificial task, modest financial incentives and very little resembling the real consequences attached to most social rules.
But the underlying mechanism is interesting.
Rules do not only tell us what we are supposed to do. Other people's behaviour tells us how seriously those rules appear to be enforced.
Once somebody violates a norm without obvious consequence, they may have done more than break it themselves. They have provided everyone watching with new information about how optional it apparently is.
And if that person belongs to our own group, their behaviour may carry even greater weight.
It helps explain why misconduct can become normal surprisingly quickly in organisations, communities and online spaces. The first violation matters. But so does the person watching the first violation and deciding that perhaps the boundary has moved.
Taking Phones Out of Classrooms Appears to Help
The argument over smartphones in education has generated considerably more confidence than experimental evidence.
A large study published in Science gives us something stronger.
Sungu, Choudhury and Bjerre-Nielsen (2026) conducted a randomised controlled trial involving 16,683 students across ten higher-education institutions in Odisha, India.
In some classes, students handed over their phones during teaching.
Academic performance improved.
The average effect was modest, around 0.07 standard deviations, but the improvement was greater among students who had previously been lower performers. Students who experienced phone-free teaching also became more supportive of phone restrictions themselves.
None of this means smartphones uniquely invented distraction.
Students managed perfectly well to stare through windows, pass notes, doodle and wonder what was for lunch long before anybody could receive a WhatsApp notification during a lecture.
But smartphones are unusually efficient at competing for attention.
They contain conversations, social approval, novelty, entertainment and an effectively unlimited supply of things more immediately rewarding than whatever happens to be written on the whiteboard.
Removing that competition appears to make learning slightly easier.
And “slightly” should not automatically be dismissed.
A small effect produced repeatedly across thousands of students and hundreds of teaching hours can still have meaningful consequences, particularly if the intervention is inexpensive.
The finding that lower-performing students benefited more is especially important. Distraction does not necessarily impose the same cost on everybody. Students already finding material difficult may have fewer cognitive resources available to absorb repeated interruptions.
There are limits to what the study tells us.
These were higher-education students in India, not schoolchildren in Britain, and collecting phones during lessons is different from imposing blanket smartphone bans throughout an entire school day.
Still, this moves the debate forward.
The question is becoming less “are phones distracting?” and more “when, where and for whom is removing them worth the trade-off?”
That is a much more useful question.
Resilience Is Not Just Being Very Good at Coping
Resilience has had an extraordinary career.
It began as a useful psychological concept describing adaptation in the face of adversity and somehow ended up appearing on workplace posters beside mountains.
A large longitudinal study from Hong Kong offers a useful reminder that resilience does not exist entirely inside the individual.
Ning and colleagues (2026) examined data from 26,210 people, testing 208 potential predictors of later psychological resilience.
Rather than focusing exclusively on personality or coping strategies, the researchers looked across a much wider range of life circumstances.
Thirty-five predictors survived validation, spanning seven broad areas including physical and mental health, life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, close relationships, financial stability and health behaviours.
That creates a rather different picture from the usual idea of resilience as the psychological equivalent of having a particularly sturdy suspension system.
People cope with adversity from within circumstances.
Someone with secure finances, supportive relationships, reasonable health and a strong sense of purpose is not confronting the same psychological problem as somebody facing the same event while isolated, ill and worried about paying the electricity bill.
Both people may display courage.
Only one has been given considerably better materials to work with.
The study is observational, so it cannot establish that improving any one of these factors will automatically make somebody more resilient. Nor does it mean individual coping skills are irrelevant.
But it does undermine the tendency to treat resilience as something people either possess or ought to develop.
That framing can become particularly uncomfortable when applied to structural problems.
Telling exhausted healthcare workers to become more resilient does not increase staffing levels. Teaching somebody breathing exercises does not reduce their rent. Encouraging psychological flexibility is unlikely to repair an abusive workplace.
Individual psychology matters enormously.
So does the environment asking that psychology to cope.
Perhaps resilience is best understood not as a trait hidden inside particularly robust people, but as an outcome produced by an interaction between individuals and the resources, relationships and circumstances surrounding them.
That version is less convenient for motivational posters.
It is probably more useful.
Simply Put
These three studies look unrelated at first.
One involves rule-breaking. One involves smartphones. One involves resilience.
But all three point towards the same easy mistake in psychology: explaining behaviour entirely by looking inside the individual.
The person breaking a rule is influenced by what everybody around them appears to tolerate.
The student struggling to concentrate is interacting with an environment engineered to compete for their attention.
The person coping badly with adversity may not simply possess less resilience. They may have fewer resources with which to be resilient.
Psychology is necessarily interested in minds.
The interesting bit is remembering that minds rarely operate alone.
Sometimes changing behaviour means changing the person.
Sometimes it means changing what surrounds them.
And quite often, the psychology lies in the relationship between the two.
References
Molleman, L., Hoyer, K., van Kleef, G. A., Scholz, C., et al. (2026). Contagion and escalation of rule violations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2026.1940
Ning, K., Kim, Y., Fan, X., et al. (2026). Understanding psychological resilience: A longitudinal environment-wide association study in Hong Kong. Nature Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-026-00742-1
Sungu, A., Choudhury, P. K., & Bjerre-Nielsen, A. (2026). Phones impede learning: Evidence from a massive phone-free classroom experiment. Science, 394(6820), 178–181. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aef7249
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