Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewThe Emergence of Social Norms and Conventions
Section snippets
Navigating a Web of Social Expectations
Even a casual observer of humanity will be struck by the similarity of behavior displayed by individuals within a community, and the surprising variation across different communities. Where people come from, or where they currently spend their time, influences the language they speak, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the currency they spend, and countless other routine behaviors: whether they eat hamburgers with their fingers (as in the USA) or knife and fork (as in Norway); eat rice
Why Do Norms Form? A Functional View
To successfully navigate the physical world, cognitive agents must form an understanding of how inanimate objects are expected to behave. The social world can pose an even more dizzying computational challenge. We take the philosopher David Lewis’ analysis of conventions [9], the most influential in a long line of philosophical treatments 10, 11, 12, as a starting point for highlighting several key theoretical properties that not only illuminate how norms work but also why they may be useful
Witnessing the Birth of New Norms
Cognitive scientists have employed three primary methods for investigating how norms emerge in a community: naturally occurring datasets describing real-world norms, laboratory investigations of norm creation in small groups of people given simple communication or decision tasks, and computer simulations of interacting agents. There is growing interest in making comparisons across these methods, for example, by validating predictions from computational models with historic records 26, 27 or new
Concluding Remarks
The norms that emerge in a community will be shaped by the cognitive processes within each individual, operating in local dyadic interactions, as well as the broader population-level infrastructure of existing norms in which these interactions are embedded. Together, these influences characterize a dynamic, multidirectional process for norm evolution. Understanding how processes operating across different temporal and spatial scales interact will be pivotal for being able to predict and control
Acknowledgements
We thank Simon DeDeo, Edgar Jose Andrade Lotero, and Paul Smaldino for their helpful comments. The first author was supported by the Stanford University Graduate Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-114747.
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