Understanding Norm Change: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Approach (Extended Version)

Abstract: Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic model to study how norms change in a society, based on the idea that different strength of norms in societies translate to different game-theoretic interaction structures and incentives. We use this model to study, both analytically and with extensive agent-based simulations, the evolutionary relationships of the need for coordination in a society (which is related to its norm strength) with two key aspects of norm change: cultural inertia (whether or how quickly the population responds when faced with conditions that make a norm change desirable), and exploration rate (the willingness of agents to try out new strategies). Our results show that a high need for coordination leads to both high cultural inertia and a low exploration rate, while a low need for coordination leads to low cultural inertia and high exploration rate. This is the first work, to our knowledge, on understanding the evolutionary causal relationships among these factors.