Learning to Be Thoughtless: Social Norms and Individual Computation

  • Authors:
  • Joshua M. Epstein

  • Affiliations:
  • Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20036, U.S.A./ E-mail: jepstein@brook.edu and The External Faculty, Santa Fe Ins ...

  • Venue:
  • Computational Economics
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

This paper extends the literature on the evolution of norms with anagent-based modelcapturing a phenomenon that has been essentially ignored, namely thatindividual thought – orcomputing – is often inversely related to the strength of a social norm.Once a norm isentrenched, we conform thoughtlessly. In this model, agents learn how tobehave (what normto adopt), but – under a strategy I term Best Reply to Adaptive SampleEvidence – they also learnhow much to think about how to behave. How much they are thinking affects howthey behave,which – given how others behave – affects how much they think. Inshort, there is feedbackbetween the social (inter-agent) and internal (intra-agent) dynamics. Inaddition, we generate thestylized facts regarding the spatio-temporal evolution of norms: localconformity, global diversity,and punctuated equilibria.