Social Norm Diffusion in Societies: Simple or Complex?

Abstract: Social norms are a fundamental component of society, shaping how we communicate, cooperate, and avoid conflict. Despite their ubiquitous presence and profound influence on behaviour, questions remain about how they spread from person to person and whether they are adopted. Using an evolutionary game-theoretic model, we study whether simple or complex contagion processes characterise how social norms spread. Crucially, contagion type is endogenous and emerges from the model. We also vary cultural conformism, the cost of following a norm, and network topology to assess the generality of our results. We show that social norms in our model can spread through simple contagion when a new norm is low in cost and cultural conformism is low, while norms spread through complex contagion when the new norm is costly and cultural conformism is high.