Do you stand aside at the supermarket allowing others to check out ahead of you, or do you stand near the person in front of you expecting to be served in order? If the latter, are you "disciplining" other shoppers?
It was the thought of the supermarket analogy that finally put many driving conundrums in place for me. If there was a roped off double queue leading to one checkout lane in order to keep those waiting from blocking the aisles, then people would zipper merge without too much trouble because they are not anonymized by virtue of sitting inside a metal box that often has tinted glass.
But if there was only one line leading to the checkout and somebody rolled their cart right up to the front of a long line and tried to cut in, the people in line would scoff at the idea, and there would likely be a communal beat down if they tried to force the issue. For this reason, I never see this happen in a supermarket. But somehow, the perceived anonymity of a car changes that for some.
I think it comes down to the McNaughton "policeman at your elbow" rule in the end. If people think they can "get away with it", a certain percentage will do it. As someone mentioned, if there were cameras recording and ticketing illegal lane changes at exits, I think the number of people behaving this way would decrease substantially.
We had a situation here in Louisville where traffic was especially congested because of a bridge closing. On the remaining bridge, they made the right hand lane exit only and the remaining two lanes "no exit/thru lanes". People ignored the signs and clogged the thru traffic trying to exit at the last minute rather than wait in line. So the city installed plastic 3 foot high pylons attached to the road between the exit lane and the thru lanes. A few people decided to just run over these in order to cut over, and once the holes in the pylon line was made, other drivers would drive up to it and attempt to exit. It wasn't until the LPD stationed a traffic officer on the bridge during rush hour that people stopped trying to merge at the last minute.
Edit:
Here's an arctile from the story above showing the city trying to solve the problem. It didn't work. The problem wasn't that people couldn't see the old dividers, but rather that they new there was no room for police cars parked on the bridge and that the likelihood of them getting busted for driving over the dividers was slight. Eventually the city posted traffic officers on foot and license plate cameras, and only that finally solved the problem.
Here's another with commentary about the failure of the strategy:
