How Social Norms Can Make the World More Regular and Better

Is there any difference between social norms and mere regularities emerging spontaneously from the behaviours of entities that have no norm-based cognition? And if so, which effects do we expect to observe in a world in which agents are endowed with such a type of cognition? The agent-based simulations presented here are aimed to understand what would happen in a world populated by normative agents, able to recognize norms and to reason upon them, compared to other, cognitively, less complex agents, following only their own individual goals