Preservation and loss of algorithmic structure in experimental diffusion of joint-action norms

Dhara Yu, Bill D. Thompson

Everyday norms of social interaction - e.g. norms of sharing space, taking turns, or queuing - are essential to large societies, offering structured procedures for common interactions. However, it remains unclear how the underlying algorithms of these implicit joint plans evolve as they diffuse through populations. Here we show that this process of diffusion can select against complex algorithms in the earliest stages. We conducted a large-scale study of experimental diffusion of novel social norms among human participants, leveraging advances in program synthesis to characterize the procedures people developed in independent populations. Inherited procedures became structurally simplified and lost during interactions between participants who inherited different variants of joint-action norms; however, opportunities for interactive repair offset this pressure, preserving complex algorithms despite misalignment. These results demonstrate that interactive reasoning mediates selective pressures on structural complexity during cultural evolution of procedural norms.