Norm adoption by newcomers

Establish that new actors inserted into a population of predictive pattern‑completion agents will adopt the population’s existing norms that are sustained by conventional sanctioning.

Background

The theory holds that norms are learned through observing sanctioning and reproducing precedent, with agents’ predictive pattern completion making norm-consistent behavior more likely in the same contexts.

Based on this mechanism, the paper conjectures that newcomers entering a norm-governed population will learn and align with prevailing norms through exposure to sanctioning and precedent, posing an adoption dynamic to be established.

References

Conjecture [Norm adoption] New actors inserted into the population will adopt existing norms.

— A Theory of Appropriateness That Accounts for Norms of Rationality  (2603.14050 - Leibo et al., 14 Mar 2026) in Conjectures, Section 5.3 (Norms)

Such a comparison matters beyond this benchmark: how agents coin and adopt words is part of how they form conventions within a community (Lewis, 2008; Ashery et al., 2025), and so of whether they can take part in one as members rather than tools, which we leave to future work.

— KoAGE: Do Large Language Models Know, Learn, and Coin Korean Neologisms?  (2610.19399 - Kim et al., 14 Oct 2026) in Limitations, final paragraph