Conditions Facilitating the Aversion of Unpopular Norms: An Agent-Based Simulation Study

Abstract

People mostly facilitate and manage their social lives adhering to the prevalent norms. There are some norms which are unpopular, yet people adhere to them. Ironically, people at individual level do not agree to these norms, but, they still follow and even facilitate them. Irrespective of the social and psychological reasons behind their persistence, sometimes, for societal good, it is necessary to oppose and possibly avert the unpopular norms. In this paper, we model theorydriven computational specifications of Emperor’s Dilemma into an agent-based simulation, to understand the the conditions that result in emergence of unpopular norms. The reciprocal nature of persistence and aversion of norms, thus, is utilized to define situations under which these norms can be changed and averted. Simulation is performed under many interesting “what-if” questions. The simulation results reveal that under high density conditions of agent population with a high percentage of norm aversion activists, the aversion of unpopular norms can be achieved.