My Agents Love to Conform: Emotions, Norms, and Social Control in Natural and Artificial Societies

This contribution investigates the function of emotion in relation to social norms, both in natural and artificial societies. First, the authors briefly illustrate that norms as socially shared mental objects play a crucial role in the dynamics of social structures and social order, in natural societies as well as in artificial systems. Second, the authors address the question how norms are enforced and thereby maintained throughout a social system. In this respect, it is shown that emotions play a crucial role by providing means for intrinsic gratification and sanctioning. The authors consider emotion related sanctions as a cost equivalent to and in many situations perhaps even more efficient than, e.g., resource-driven penalties. Consequently, agents’ anticipation of negative emotional outcomes as a consequence of deviant behaviour is supposed to exert social control. Third, the authors outline the possibilities of an application to the socionic multi-agent architecture SONAR