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

TL;DR

This study experimentally demonstrates how social conventions can spontaneously emerge in decentralized populations without formal institutions, influenced by network structure, highlighting the natural evolution of shared norms.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that social conventions can form spontaneously without centralized coordination, emphasizing the role of network structure in norm development.

Findings

Shared conventions emerge spontaneously in decentralized groups.

Network structure influences the speed and nature of norm formation.

Simple structural changes can direct the evolution of social norms.

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.