ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Collective action and the evolution of social norm internalization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contagion and escalation of rule violations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- How local social norms shape global environmental action: The role of norm misperceptions in environmental attitude-behaviour cycles.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Differentiating Social and Moral Norms in Perceived Internalization.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- One's Actions "Aging Poorly": An Integrative Egocentric Framework for Understanding Impression Management Errors and the Challenge of Temporal Impression Management.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Review
- Cultural tightness and social cohesion under coevolving beliefs, behaviors, and preferences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Determinants of Rule-Breaking in Adolescence.Journal of adolescence · 2025Article
- Teacher knows best? The social influence of teachers and peers in high school.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2025Article
- Scarcity and Cooperation: The Modulation of Social Norms.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Why people follow rules.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- A complex adaptive systems model of labour reciprocity and normative reasoning in swidden agriculture.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- A computational account of multiple motives guiding context-dependent prosocial behavior.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Pressured to be proud? Investigating the link between perceived norms and intergroup attitudes in members of disadvantaged minority groups.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- Maintaining cooperation through vertical communication of trust when removing sanctions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Beyond ad hominem attacks: A typology of the discursive tactics used when objecting to news commentary on social media.PloS one · 2025Article
- Complex systems perspective in assessing risks in artificial intelligence.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2024Article
- Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Anticonformists catalyze societal transitions and facilitate the expression of evolving preferences.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- The model of norm-regulated responsibility for proenvironmental behavior in the context of littering prevention.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Nonlinear social evolution and the emergence of collective action.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- When norm change hurts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Human behavior is strongly affected by culturally transmitted norms and values. Certain norms are internalized (i.e., acting according to a norm becomes an end in itself rather than merely a tool in achieving certain goals or avoiding social sanctions). Humans' capacity to internalize norms likely evolved in our ancestors to simplify solving certain challenges-including social ones. Here we study theoretically the evolutionary origins of the capacity to internalize norms. In our models, individuals can choose to participate in collective actions as well as punish free riders. In making their decisions, individuals attempt to maximize a utility function in which normative values are initially irrelevant but play an increasingly important role if the ability to internalize norms emerges. Using agent-based simulations, we show that norm internalization evolves under a wide range of conditions so that cooperation becomes "instinctive." Norm internalization evolves much more easily and has much larger effects on behavior if groups promote peer punishment of free riders. Promoting only participation in collective actions is not effective. Typically, intermediate levels of norm internalization are most frequent but there are also cases with relatively small frequencies of "oversocialized" individuals willing to make extreme sacrifices for their groups no matter material costs, as well as "undersocialized" individuals completely immune to social norms. Evolving the ability to internalize norms was likely a crucial step on the path to large-scale human cooperation.
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