Norm Emergence in Population of Evolving Strategies

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The emergence of social norms accompanied by effective sanctions is an important social process, yet no social theory satisfactorily gives the conditions under which norms will emerge, nor the process by which they emerge. This project aims at developing such theory by means of mathematical modeling accompanied by computer simulation. The work will build upon recent work in evolutionary biology by Maynard Smith and others which has led to the idea of evolutionarily stable strategies, as well as on the work of Axelrod and others in experimentation and computer tournaments with an iterated prisoners dilemma. The work will attempt especially to explore the effects of social structure on the development of effective sanctions. The predictions of a mathematical model about the effects of variations in social structure will be tested against computer simulation of systems of mutually contingent strategies. The significance of this work beyond the development of social theory lies in practical questions of social control, such as, for example the question of the conditions under which adults are able to establish an effective normative system governing the behavior of adolescents.