The Spontaneous Emergence of Conventions: An Experimental Study of Cultural Evolution

Abstract

How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal or informal institutions, such as incentives for global agreement, coordinated leadership, or aggregated information about the population, are needed to facilitate a solution. Evolutionary theories of social conventions, by contrast, hypothesize that such institutions are not necessary in order for social conventions to form. However, empirical tests of this hypothesis have been hindered by the difficulties of evaluating the real-time creation of new collective behaviors in large decentralized populations. Here, we present experimental results - replicated at several scales - that demonstrate the spontaneous creation of universally adopted social conventions, and show how simple changes in a population's network structure can direct the dynamics of norm formation, driving human populations with no ambition for large scale coordination to rapidly evolve shared social conventions.

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations
• A gentle introduction to the minimal Naming Game
• Evolutionary Processes in Quantum Decision Theory
• Shaping New Norms for AI
• Consensus and Information Cascades in Game-Theoretic Imitation Dynamics with Static and Dynamic Network Topologies
• Human-agent coordination in a group formation game
• Reinforcement Communication Learning in Different Social Network Structures
• Consensus in Complex Networks with Noisy Agents and Peer Pressure
• Group adaptation drives opinion dynamics in higher-order networks
• Topological aspects of the multi-language phases of the Naming Game on community-based networks
• Voter-like dynamics with conflicting preferences on modular networks
• Influence of periodic external fields in multiagent models with language dynamics
• The emergence of segregation: from observable markers to group specific norms