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This chapter focuses not so much on rocks, but on the hydraulics of the river—the currents that guide our behavior, namely, norms. Internal and external sanctions, beliefs about negative consequences, and feelings of personal responsibility associated with norms are forces that push our behavior, much as currents push our boat. The failure of people to act consistently with their pro-environmental attitudes often comes when situations or other attitudes deactivate pro-environmental norms. In our investigation of norms, we again turn to Leopold. In his time, he smoked cigarettes and killed and ate wild trout. If he were to continue these behaviors today he would be paddling upstream against strong normative currents. Norms change, but not often and seldom quickly. The chapter concludes by exploring how new norms and currents emerge and strengthen over time.

This chapter examines the reasons why norms that are bad for everyone concerned might nonetheless exist and persist. It shows that in many cases, either the mechanisms that promote norm emergence or norm persistence are unrelated to any purpose the norm might serve, with the consequence that some norms can be bad or the mechanisms that ought to connect with purposes fail to do so sufficiently well to ensure that the only norms that persist are ones that serve those purposes well.

Norms represent a most salient feature of social organization, but no common definition is available as yet, and there is a major dichotomy in the nature of norms between what is called the deontic and the conventionalist traditions; moreover, the link between norms and sanctions is often unclear. The work presented in this volume aims to contribute to advances at the conceptual, modeling, theoretical, and operational treatment of norms. In this book, a general notion of norms as behaviors spreading over a society of agents—on condition that the corresponding prescriptions and mental representations spread as well—is proposed. A dynamic model of norms will be presented, and an operational, simulation-based version of this model will be implemented and tested by means of agent-based simulations where agents are equipped with a cognitively rich architecture (EMIL-A). Advances in the theory of norms will be shown to derive from the operational modeling of their two-way dynamics, highlighting the need for the two complementary concepts of emergence and immergence.

This chapter is based on empirical work conducted on Wikipedia as an emergent self-regulated and self-organized community. Two studies were conducted, focusing on the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles. One study is about “featured” and “controversial” articles, which cover special and restricted topics, respectively, while the other study focuses on discussions about the person and role of Sarah Palin as a candidate for vice president of the United States. These studies cover a wide range of collaborative writing and of discussion about collaborative writing, and aim to support the design of the EMIL-S simulation architecture suitable for the wider study of normative mechanisms. Some but not all of the findings of the empirical analysis of the behavior of contributors to and discussants of Wikipedia articles are used to build a simulation model of collaborative writing. As software agents are still not able to use natural language to produce texts, an artificial language whose symbols do not refer to anything in the real world was invented. Accordingly, the software agents were endowed with the capability to produce text in this language and to evaluate something like the “style of writing” in this language. Thus they are able to take offence at certain features of texts and to blame the authors of such texts. From this kind of communication, norms emerge in the artificial society of software agents.

This chapter describes the process of converting the cognitive architecture of EMIL-A into a software architecture that can execute simulation models of social processes of norm emergence in different kinds of scenarios. EMIL-A describes the model of the process going on in human actors’ minds when they receive normative requests or observe other actors’ behavior, and Chapter 7 showed some first experiments with EMIL-A agents, albeit with no software architecture especially adapted to the underlying theory. The structure of this chapter is as follows: Sections 8.1 through 8.3 start with a general overview of agent-based systems and their requirements of a multi-agent simulation system, in which agents with norm-oriented behavior and norm-formation capabilities can be defined and simulated. Section 8.4 recapitulates the cognitive architecture of EMIL-A, followed in Section 8.5 by a list of correspondences between the main terms of both models. In Sections 8.6 and 8.7, the remaining differences between the EMIL-A design and the EMIL-S implementation are discussed, and it is argued that these differences are mainly technical and that EMIL-S necessarily implemented more details than EMIL-A foresaw.

The chapter studies how norms emerge or come to be abandoned. It argues how norm change always entails a change in social expectations. It also addresses which expectations must first change for a norm to be abandoned, and which expectations have to be created for a norm to develop. It explains how social dilemmas can be solved by norms, as well as how cognitive biases affect the possibility of norm change. The chapter examines the role of scripts and schemata in norm change, and to illustrate these roles it takes examples from the field: sanitation and child marriage.