Epstein (CE 2001) Learning to be thoughtless: social norms and individual computation

Individual thought (computing) is often inversely related to the strength of a social norm.

Two features of social conventions

1. self-enforcing

2. once entrenched, we conform without thinking about it

The author mistakenly attribute the features of individual habits to social conventions. We do something without thinking about it because we've already formed a habit of taking the action, be it a social convention or not.

The strength of a norm is represented by the variance of the actions taken by individuals. The disutility of deviating from a social norm is related to the strength of that norm.  

when there is no time to think or not enough information based on which we can draw conclusion, we usually do what most others will do

do whatever everyone else is doing

1. some one may have relevant information that you don't know

(2. comparative performance is determinant in evolution)


we can use a sampling size less than n...

agent-based model is a generative model