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AbstractDynamic norms have recently emerged as a powerful method to encourage individuals to adopt an innovation by highlighting a growing trend in its uptake. However, there have been no concrete attempts to understand how this individual-level mechanism might shape the collective population behavior. Here, we develop a framework to examine this by encapsulating dynamic norms within a game-theoretic mathematical model for innovation diffusion. Specifically, we extend a network coordination game by incorporating a probabilistic mechanism where an individual adopts the action with growing popularity, instead of the standard best-response update rule; the probability of such an event captures the population's "sensitivity" to dynamic norms. Theoretical analysis reveals that sensitivity to dynamic norms is key to facilitating social diffusion. Small increases in sensitivity reduces the advantage of the innovation over status quo or the number of initial innovators required to unlock diffusion, while a sufficiently large sensitivity alone guarantees diffusion.

This study investigates the influence of dynamic norms messages on behavioral intention via perceived future descriptive norms for two different pro-environmental behaviors and tests for the moderating role of group identity in the relationship between dynamic norms and behavior. The findings of an experiment show that perceived future descriptive norms mediate the effect of dynamic norms messages on behavioral intention. In addition, the pattern of dynamic norms message effects is dependent on group identity. When the reference group in a message is viewed as an in-group member and similar to oneself, dynamic norms messages are more influential than conventional low descriptive norms messages; on the other hand, when the reference group is perceived as an out-group and dissimilar to oneself, conventional low descriptive norms messages are more influential than dynamic norms messages. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The behaviour of norm-autonomous agents is determined by their goals and the norms that are explicitly represented inside their minds. Thus, they require mechanisms for acquiring and accepting norms, determining when norms are relevant to their case, and making decisions about norm compliance. Up un- til now the existing proposals on norm-autonomous agents assume that agents interact within a deterministic environment that is certainly perceived. In prac- tice, agents interact by means of sensors and actuators under uncertainty with non-deterministic and dynamic environments. Therefore, the existing propos- als are unsuitable or, even, useless to be applied when agents have a physical presence in some real-world environment. In response to this problem we have developed the n-BDI architecture. In this paper, we propose a multi -context graded BDI architecture (called n-BDI) that models norm-autonomous agents able to deal with uncertainty in dynamic environments. The n-BDI architecture has been experimentally evaluated and the results are shown in this paper. ; This paper was partially funded by the Spanish government under Grant CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022 and the Valencian government under Project PROMETEOH/2013/019. ; Criado Pacheco, N.; Argente, E.; Noriega, P.; Botti Navarro, VJ. (2014). Reasoning about norms under uncertainty in dynamic environments. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning. 55(9):2049-2070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijar.2014.02.004 ; S ; 2049 ; 2070 ; 55 ; 9

The earliest approach by international lawyers to the question of cybersecurity was focused on collective security. Regarding this issue, there is consensus on the evolutionary and dynamic application, difficult in any case, of the basic rules concerning the prohibition of the threat and the use of force that already exists in the international order. However, cybersecurity does not only concern peace and security, as it is considered a problematic issue that poses various challenges from other international legal perspectives. This paper aims to analyse cybersecurity from this more holistic approach, pointing out the shortcomings of this evolutionary application as well as the efforts that have been carried out so far in order to promote international cooperation in this field so as to achieve norm-development.

Emotions of task group members tend to be congruent, yet the processes that lead to this congruence are not well understood. In this study, we longitudinally followed the convergence of anger and gratitude in 68 task groups, and investigated the role of emotion norms in achieving this convergence. Over time, individual members' emotions influenced the group's emotions, and, conversely, the group's emotions influenced individual members' emotions. Moreover, over time the coherence between the emotions of different group members became stronger. This supports the idea that the emotions within groups converge. In addition, we found evidence for the dynamic interplay between norms and experience. Norms guided experience, and experience became normative, both at the individual and group levels. In addition, group norms on a particular emotion predicted individuals' experience of that emotion over time, and conversely, individual members' norms about an emotion predicted the group's experience of that emotion.

Household adoption of rooftop solar panels and battery storage can potentially reduce the negative environmental impacts of the electric grid. We argue that the number of socially close (friends and family) and geographically close (neighbors) others who have rooftop solar panels will affect norm expectations regarding how much others approve of solar panels and battery storage and expectations about how personally beneficial those technologies are likely to be. We test our hypotheses using survey data collected from California homeowners and find partial support. We find evidence for the significance of socially close others (rather than neighbors), highlighting the importance of identifying the appropriate reference groups when studying norms. Our results also provide insight into how one category of behavior (adoption of solar panels) can influence norm expectations about another less visible behavior (battery storage), suggesting a mechanism that may contribute to norms regulating private behaviors.

AbstractSocial norms are strongly associated with pro-environmental behaviors, but the evolution and dynamic effects of norms are less well understood. This article builds on the distinction of norms being descriptive, characterizing what people actually do, or injunctive, characterizing what people should do. It identifies four categories of norms with the further distinction of whether the norms arise from the personal beliefs and actions or from the behaviors and judgments of others. The analysis uses five years of longitudinal US data that track household recycling and controls for household characteristics as well as differences in state recycling laws. The results extend previous research by showing that personal norms exhibit cascading dynamics in which norms encourage later changes in recycling, while recycling encourages later changes in personal norms. This mutual reinforcement implies that societal actions encouraging change in either personal norms or recycling will support growth in the other. Recognizing this interdependence can assist in the effective utilization of social norms as a behavioral policy instrument.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the gender divide in American higher education narrowed rapidly as women shifted their aims from homemaking to careers. The dynamic-social-norms hypothesis explains why we observe unexpected and rapid rather than gradual change in women's education and employment. The explanation draws on a theory of social change developed by Timur Kuran that predicts revolutionary rather than incremental shifts in social norms. Critical to the argument is the claim that in some settings the choices of individuals depend in part on the choices of others. In the presence of interdependencies, the potential exists for unexpected and rapid transformations, such as that occurring in higher education between 1965 and 1975.

Social norms regulate our behavior in a variety of mundane and far-reaching contexts, from tipping at the restaurant to social distancing during a pandemic. However, how social norms emerge, persist, and change is still poorly understood. Here the authors investigate experimentally whether spontaneously emerging behavioral regularities (i.e., conventions) gain normativity over time and, if so, whether their normative underpinning makes them resistant to changes in economic incentives. To track the coevolution of behavior and normativity, the authors use a set of measures to elicit participants' first- and second-order normative beliefs and their (dis)approval of other participants' behaviors. The authors find that even in the limited duration of their lab experiment, conventions gain normativity that makes these conventions resistant to change, especially if they promote egalitarian outcomes and the change in economic incentives is relatively small. These findings advance our understanding of how cognitive, social and economic mechanisms interact in bringing about social change.

The moral economy is a set of institutionalized rules, norms, and values that guide action in market economies. Historically, the norm of wage negotiations has been a central pillar of the U.S. moral economy, but research suggests that this may be changing. In the present study, the authors seek to evaluate whether the norm of wage negotiations is decoupled from the U.S. moral economy. Results of a factorial survey experiment administered to a quota sample of U.S. adults ( N = 707) indicate that the norm of wage negotiations is weak: it is largely bipolar, conditional, and of a low to moderate intensity, with disagreement over the norm as well as the circumstances demarcating the norm. These social cleavages, however, do not fall along demographic lines: the character of the norm is comparable across groups. These findings reveal that there has been an erosion of the distributional norms underlying the U.S. moral economy.