There is a debate between two different perspectives to understand the issue: “why people should obey rules". One is the instrumental perspective that emphasizes benefits and costs, and the other is the normative perspective arguing that morality and norms are more important. To test and to surpass both arguments from the two sides, this paper discusses the rule obeisance in virtual community, which is a new and concrete situation. On basis of statistic analysis of collected quantitative data, the paper concludes that in virtual community, normative factors contribute more than instrumental factors to the rule obeisance. This conclusion highlights the importance of morality in Chinese society and may lead to more interesting research.
