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So you are driving along the road when you approach a crossroads junction, a place where two roads cross one another. You are in the middle of nowhere; the terrain is flat and featureless for miles around, and you can very clearly see that there isn't a single car but yours on any of the two roads for miles around. Nor are there any speed cameras, traffic control cameras, or any place where a speed trap of any kind could be operating.

As you approach the junction, the traffic lights turn red. You know with absolute certainty that there is no danger at all if you simply drove through anyway. But the lights have turned red, just as you reach them.

Question : Do you stop and wait for the lights, or do you simply drive through and continue on? And either way, why?

I used to drive through a intersection like this almost everyday back in my old job in NZ. It was a 70kmh zone, so I'd usually let down on the gas and cruise through at like 40. I slowed down in case there was a cyclist with out lights or wildlife on the roads, which there was occasionally.

I can't see why there would be lights on such a road. Surely a give way would be more appropriate. Yes, I would likely stop, especially if I didn't know the place much. After all there could be invisible rocket sleds, or some such, passing the other way ever few seconds, that I'm not aware of. If it was a routine place I went to I would ask for the lights, that seem to serve no purpose, other than to annoy people, to be removed and replaced with give way lines.

Makes me remember a road in Portugal. It had traffic lights every few 100 yards, if you where speeding then the next light would go red. If you behaved yourself then they stayed green. Each one was a junction so you couldn't just roll through them, incase someone was coming the other way.

I probably would stop just out of force of habit

I would go. Technically it is illegal to do so however if there isnt a single a car for miles then it is safe to go across. Lights are a safety feature for traffic.

Also its not illegal if you don't get caught.

The intersection I went through was busy as hell during the day but dead at night, industrial area.

There is a light by my parents house that is useless. The road isnt busy even during the busiest hours and completely dead at night. Not to mention the light has perhaps 7 seconds of green before it turns yellow but has at least a three minute green on the intersecting road. People treat that light as a stop sign. Well the locals do.

Griffin wrote:I probably would stop just out of force of habit

Would you still stop if you thought about it, rather than just acting out of habit?

I'd stop, even if thinking about it. With my luck, Murphy's Law would kick in hardcore.

My brother got done for a rolling stop once at a stop sign, dead road, no one around, slowed right down to like 2kph rather than total stop and went through. Cop car was parked like 10m up a driveway watching the intersection,

To be honest, I think I'd stop myself. But I don't think it's really rational to do so.

It interests me because I think all rules do both harm and good; a good rule is one in which the good it does outweighs the harm it does. Obviously there have to be traffic rules, because if everybody just drove as they saw fit there would be chaos, accidents and death - I'm sure Ian can tell stories of the driving in some places where there are no rules.

So it's to our overall benefit to follow a good rule... but even a good rule results in harm. In this case the harm is pretty minimal, merely a minute or two of wasted time, but it's still harm of a sort.

So the question is, is it alright to break a good rule in a specific instance, rather than in the general one? Is it alright to break the rule to avoid the harm, if you can guarantee that following it won't actually do any good?

It seems to me that the rational thing to do is judge the situation on it's merits - stopping now, in this one case, only inflicts a tiny amount of harm, but balanced against that, it achieves absolutely nothing at all. But... when I think about it, I just see myself stopping anyway. And I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm not as rational as a like to think?

Our society is very heavily based on people not making their own judgements and just following the rules. In fastfood there is very specific training for almost every situation. But when something out of the ordinary happens the staff can totally freeze having no idea what to happen. Even if the person is very smart an independent outside of work, inside that environment they are a robot.

I remember back in uni when I worked at Subway, one of our senior staff members, very bright girl, got handed a bottle of milk by a mother and asked to heat it up. The look on her face was if she had been asked to whistle the color purple.

If I thought about it I'd probably stop, if for no other reason that that's the rules. I may not be the best person to ask though, given I failed the practical driving test on 3 separate occasions.

You see it all the time in disasters. If there's a plan to follow, then everyone knows their part. Like that Typhoon recently - the public know that their part is to donate to charities (if they are so inclined), the governments know all the right things to say and what support to lend, the charities know to fly aid in and distribute it, etc.

But when something new and unexpected happens, like 9/11 for example, nobody has a clue what to do or how to react. There's no plan, no rules to follow, so everyone is caught flatfooted.

But the rules can be so ingrained that we follow them even when they're not appropriate, or even counterproductive. Which is where it gets interesting, to me.