But without some rules вЂ“ and some tendency for us to stick to them вЂ“ society would slide rapidly into pandemonium. The urge to overturn stifling, unjust or simply downright pointless rules is entirely justified. These rules aren't just invented by rulers and imposed from the top down вЂ“ instead, they often arise, unbidden, from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactions.

She found that people collectively construct rules about, say, how many cattle a person can graze, where, and when who gets how much water, and what should be done when the resource is limited who monitors whom, and which rules resolve disputes. The political economist Elinor Ostrom (who shared the Noble Prize for economics in 2009) observed the same phenomenon of spontaneous rule construction when people had collectively to manage common resources such as common land, fisheries, or water for irrigation. Indeed, a game with no rules is no game at all. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn't at least once raged against the offside rule.Д«ut chess or football without rules wouldnвЂ™t be chess or footballВ вЂ“ they would be entirely formless and meaningless activities. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to 'castle' to get out of check, but find that they say I canвЂ™t or if I find your pawn getting to my side of the board and turning into a queen, rook, knight or bishop. And many would argue it is all the more powerful for it:Д¬onsider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles вЂ“ even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules, but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent.Д«yron was a notorious rule breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and metre. Some вЂ“ Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example вЂ“ have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free? In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we'd all be doomed, the very words IвЂ™m writing now follow the rules of English.

The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.ДЄ good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules.

We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're 'there to be broken'.Д«ut as a behavioural scientist I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem вЂ“ but the unjustified ones. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten вЂ“ it's practically a rule of life. Do we really need all these rules, why should I follow them and what would happen if we all ignored them?' Will, 28, London From the endless signs that tell me to 'stand on the right' on escalators or 'skateboarding forbidden' in public places to all those unwritten societal rules such as the expectation that I should settle down, buy a house and have a family. 'I'm in my late 20s and I'm feeling more and more constrained by rules.

Instructions for life game