期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2015
卷号：112
期号：7
页码：1989-1994
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1418838112
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：SignificanceSocial conventions shape every aspect of our lives, from how we greet each other to the languages we speak. Yet their origins have been a topic of theoretical speculation since the time of Aristotle. Most approaches assume that institutions are necessary to organize large populations, but the simplest explanation is that universally accepted conventions are the unintended consequence of individuals' efforts to coordinate locally with one another. Although this hypothesis is compelling, it lacks conclusive empirical support. Here, we present results from controlled experiments demonstrating that changes in network connectivity can cause global social conventions to spontaneously emerge from local interactions, even though people have no knowledge about the population, or that they are coordinating at a global scale. How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology, and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal or informal institutions, such as incentives for global agreement, coordinated leadership, or aggregated information about the population, are needed to facilitate a solution. Evolutionary theories of social conventions, by contrast, hypothesize that such institutions are not necessary in order for social conventions to form. However, empirical tests of this hypothesis have been hindered by the difficulties of evaluating the real-time creation of new collective behaviors in large decentralized populations. Here, we present experimental results--replicated at several scales--that demonstrate the spontaneous creation of universally adopted social conventions and show how simple changes in a population's network structure can direct the dynamics of norm formation, driving human populations with no ambition for large scale coordination to rapidly evolve shared social conventions.
