Social Norms on Agents’ Demographic Events

Abstract

The experience of the major events in the life of people such as births, deaths, migrations and the formation of partnerships is influenced by social norms. This affects the dynamics of human populations. Nevertheless, research on the topic has not so far been able to disentangle many issues on this important idea. On the other hand, the dynamics of a population of (possibly cognitive) agents is of central importance in the construction of multi-agent systems. Demographic events, with their consequences on population dynamics, provide an interesting example also for people interested in MAS or social simulation. We discuss definition of social norms for demographic events and we exploit some categories used in formal demography to outline a typology of social norms relevant to demographic behavior. We then briefly deal with the problem of measuring social norms for demographic events from individual-level surveys. We propose a central role for (multi-) agent-based approaches to the study of social norms on demographic events.