Noe: Norms Emergence and Robustness Based on Emotions in Multiagent Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how incorporating emotions into multi-agent systems influences the emergence and stability of social norms, showing that emotional responses promote norm compliance and enhance societal welfare.

Contribution

It introduces a novel emotional reasoning framework for agents that affects norm emergence and robustness in social simulations.

Findings

Emotional responses increase norm compliance.

Considering emotions improves societal welfare.

Emotional modeling enhances norm robustness.

Abstract

Social norms characterize collective and acceptable group conducts in human society. Furthermore, some social norms emerge from interactions of agents or humans. To achieve agent autonomy and make norm satisfaction explainable, we include emotions into the normative reasoning process, which evaluates whether to comply or violate a norm. Specifically, before selecting an action to execute, an agent observes the environment and infers the state and consequences with its internal states after norm satisfaction or violation of a social norm. Both norm satisfaction and violation provoke further emotions, and the subsequent emotions affect norm enforcement. This paper investigates how modeling emotions affect the emergence and robustness of social norms via social simulation experiments. We find that an ability in agents to consider emotional responses to the outcomes of norm satisfaction and violation (1) promotes norm compliance; and (2) improves societal welfare.