Norm internalization in artificial societies

Abstract

Internalization is at study in social-behavioural sciences and moral philosophy since long; of late, the debate was revamped within the rationality approach to the study of cooperation and compliance since 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 the mental underpinnings of internalization. This paper advocates a rich cognitive model of different types, degrees and factors of internalization. In order to check the individual and social effect of internalization, we have adapted an existing agent architecture, EMIL-A, providing it with internalization capabilities, turning it into EMIL-I-A. Experiments have proven satisfactory results with respect to the maintenance of cooperation in a proof-of-concept simulation.