Spurious normativity enhances learning of compliance and enforcement behavior in artificial agents

How do societies learn and maintain social norms? Here we use multiagent reinforcement learning to investigate the learning dynamics of enforcement and compliance behaviors. Artificial agents populate a foraging environment and need to learn to avoid a poisonous berry. Agents learn to avoid eating poisonous berries better when doing so is taboo, meaning the behavior is punished by other agents. The taboo helps overcome a credit assignment problem in discovering delayed health effects. Critically, introducing an additional taboo, which results in punishment for eating a harmless berry, further improves overall returns. This “silly rule” counterintuitively has a positive effect because it gives agents more practice in learning rule enforcement. By probing what individual agents have learned, we demonstrate that normative behavior relies on a sequence of learned skills. Learning rule compliance builds upon prior learning of rule enforcement by other agents. Our results highlight the benefit of employing a multiagent reinforcement learning computational model focused on learning to implement complex actions.