Minding Norms: Mechanisms and Dynamics of Social Order in Agent Societies

The book presents theoretical, methodological, and technical advances in the study of norms in societies of autonomous intelligent agents, based on a collaboration among social, computational, and cognitive scientists. By conceptualizing norms as social and cognitive phenomena undergoing a complex dynamics, and thanks to a computational, agent-based approach, contributors address three sets of questions: (a) What are norms, and how may we differentiate them from social conformism on one hand and acquiescence under menace on the other? (b) How do norms emerge and change? An innovative answer is found in the interplay between the mental and social dynamics of norms. (c) How can we characterize the agents from among which norms emerge, why and how people represent norms and abide with or violate them in a non-necessarily deliberative way? Throughout the book, the surprise is that conformity is only the tip of the normative iceberg. Norms emerge in society while "immerging" into the mind. Their mental dynamics, occurring beneath the line of observation, allows all the sets of questions to be answered: a special agent architecture is needed for norm immergence, which in turn allows us to account for how norm-based behavior emerges as a special form of social regularity. After a review of different approaches, the volume presents a dynamic model of norms, the normative agent architecture, a simulation platform, and the artificial experiments testing the view of norms and the architecture proposed against a number of more or less realistic social scenarios.