Internalizing Norms: A Cognitive Model of (Social) Norms' Internalization

Internalization is at study in social-behavioural sciences and moral philosophy; lately, the debate was revamped within the rationality approach to the study of cooperation and compliance because internalization is a less costly and more reliable enforcement system than social control. But how does it work? So far, poor attention was paid to mental underpinnings of internalization. This article advocates a rich cognitive model of different types, degrees and factors of internalization. In future work, it will be implemented on a normative agent platform to simulate the individual and social effect of internalization. DOI: 10.4018/jats.2010120105 64 International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, 2(1), 63-73, January-March 2010 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. nalization is still fragmentary and insufficient. The main purpose of this article is to argue for the necessity of a rich cognitive modelling of norm internalization in order to (a) provide a unifying view of the phenomenon, accounting for the features it shares with related phenomena (e.g., robust conformity as in automatic behavior) and the specific properties that keep it distinct from them (autonomy); (b) model the process of internalization, i.e. its proximate causes (as compared to the distal, evolutionary, ones; see Gintis, 2003, 2004); (c) characterize it as a progressive process, occurring at various levels of depth and giving rise to more or less robust compliance; and finally (d) allow for flexible conformity, enabling agents to retrieve full control (Bargh et al., 2001) over norms which have been converted into automatic behavioral responses (Epstein, 2007). Thanks to such a model, it will be possible to adapt existing agent architectures (such as EMIL-A, cf. Andrighetto et al., 2007) and simulation platforms (EMIL-S, see Troitzsch, 2008) to test hypotheses concerning (a) individual and social effects of internalization, (b) factors favoring or hindering internalization, and (c) the evolution of internalization in future societies. Throughout the article, the process of norm internalization is meant as a mental process that takes (social) norms as inputs and gives new goals of the internalizing agent (from now on, the internalizer) as outputs. Emotions, playing a significant but not necessary role in this process, will not be investigated at this stage.