Our general objective is to explain how norms can emerge in complex, ambiguous situations: settings with large and complex spaces of normative options over which populations may try to agree using only limited, indirect knowledge of each others’ currently preferred options, possibly gained through limited interaction samples. We study this process using the concrete example of agents developing...

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OBJECTIVE This article categorizes and describes current media campaigns to reduce college student drinking, reviews key principles of campaign design and outlines recommendations for future campaigns. METHOD The article describes three types of media campaigns on student drinking: information, social norms marketing, and advocacy. Key principles of campaign design are derived from work in co...

Groups or societies of agents may collaborate on a common goal and thereby achieve more than by working individually. This paper discusses the use of societal theories to model the carrying out of a plan by a group of agents. We focus on plans that relate to agent motion since the low-level aspects of such plans are well understood and motion provides clear criteria for successful planning. We ...

Etiquette is about adhering to prescribed norms in social interactions, or about negotiating and making explicit interactional norms when they do not already exist. While these play a role in most realms of human interaction, the establishment of such norms has been demonstrated to be especially crucial in domains in which a person is attempting to undergo a change in behavior or cognitive or a...

The advent of virtual environments such as SecondLife call for a distributed approach for norm emergence and spreading. In open virtual environments, monitoring various interacting agents (avatars), using a centralized authority might be computationally expensive. The number of possible states and actions of an agent could be huge. An approach for sustaining order and smoother functioning of th...

In many Western societies, drug users are accountable for heterosexual transmission of HIV. Although various studies have shown that safe sex is not a common practice among drug users, we still have little understanding of the factors that determine their use of condoms in their sexual relationships with steady or casual partners. The objective of this study is to gain more insight into the det...

Face identity aftereffects suggest that an average face, which is continuously updated by experience, functions as a norm for coding identity. Sex-contingent figural face aftereffects indicate that different norms are maintained for male and female faces but do not directly implicate them in coding identity. Here, we investigated whether sex-specific norms are used to code the identities of mal...