Normative Feeling: Socially Patterned Affective Mechanisms

TL;DR

This paper explores how normative social processes influence the evolution of affective mechanisms, demonstrating through agent-based modeling that punishment-based norms promote resource conservation and social signaling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel agent-based model showing how normative punishment mechanisms shape mood and social preferences evolutionarily, highlighting the emergence of social signaling without physical enforcement.

Findings

Punishment leads to mood-based social signaling for resource conservation.

Competition results in a tragedy of the commons and population collapse.

Normative processes embed cultural patterns into psychological dispositions.

Abstract

Breaking a norm elicits both material and emotional consequences, yet how this coupling arose evolutionarily remains unclear. We investigate this question in light of emerging work suggesting that normativity's building blocks emerged earlier in evolution than previously considered, arguing that normative processes should inform accounts of how even ancient capacities such as mood evolved. Using a definition of normative processes we developed, we created an agent-based model with evolvable affect in a shared resource dilemma, comparing competition (non-normative) versus punishment (normative) conditions. Critically, different mood mechanisms emerge under each condition. Under competition, agents evolve a "bad mood -> consume more" response, creating a tragedy of the commons leading to resource depletion and population collapse. Under punishment, agents evolve a "bad mood -> consume less" mechanism, where negative affect functions as an implicit signal of social sanction, promoting resource conservation. Importantly, once normative logic is imprinted through punishment, it creates an evolutionary pathway for mood-based signalling that operates without costly physical enforcement. Our findings demonstrate how normative processes enable social preferences to emerge in a distributed manner within psychological mechanisms, showing how normative processes reprogram cognitive and physiological systems by embedding cultural patterns into psychological dispositions.