Norm and Social Compliance: A Computational Study

The necessity to model the mental ingredients of norm compliance is a controversial issue within the study of norms. So far, the simulation-based study of norm emergence has shown a prevailing tendency to model norm conformity as a thoughtless behavior, emerging from social learning and imitation rather than from specific, norm-related mental representations. In this article, the opposite stance-namely, a view of norms as hybrid, two-faceted phenomena, including a behavioral/social and an internal/mental side-is taken. Such a view is aimed at accounting for the difference between norms, on one hand, and either behavioral regularities conventions on the other. After a brief presentation of a normative agent architecture, the preliminary results of agent-based simulations testing the impact of norm recognition and the role of normative beliefs in the emergence and stabilization of social norms are presented and discussed. We focused our attention on the effects which the use of a cognitive architecture namely a norm recognition module produces on the environment.