Diffusion of social norms favors simpler rules but interaction preserves complexity
Preservation and loss of algorithmic structure in experimental diffusion of joint-action norms
Computation and LanguageMultiagent Systems
Summary
Social norms help people interact smoothly in daily life, like taking turns or sharing space. This study by the authors shows that when new social rules spread among people, simpler versions tend to be kept early on because complex rules get lost. However, when people interact and try to fix misunderstandings together, these more complicated rules can survive. This means the way people talk and work through differences helps keep social behaviors from becoming too simple.
What this means in practice
- •For community organizers: Design community guidelines that consider how simple rules diffuse more easily but support interactive repair to maintain richer social practices.
- •For collaboration platform developers: Improve software for group coordination by incorporating mechanisms that facilitate interactive repair of shared norms to preserve complex joint actions.
Authors
Dhara Yu, Bill D. Thompson
Abstract
Everyday norms of social interaction - e.g. norms of sharing space, taking turns, or queuing - are essential to large societies, offering structured procedures for common interactions. However, it remains unclear how the underlying algorithms of these implicit joint plans evolve as they diffuse through populations. Here we show that this process of diffusion can select against complex algorithms in the earliest stages. We conducted a large-scale study of experimental diffusion of novel social norms among human participants, leveraging advances in program synthesis to characterize the procedures people developed in independent populations. Inherited procedures became structurally simplified and lost during interactions between participants who inherited different variants of joint-action norms; however, opportunities for interactive repair offset this pressure, preserving complex algorithms despite misalignment. These results demonstrate that interactive reasoning mediates selective pressures on structural complexity during cultural evolution of procedural norms.