According to David Lewis (1969), social conventions are behavioral regularities that are stable but relatively arbitrary solutions to repeated coordination problems. A paradigmatic example is using language to communicate:
- Repeated problem: using sensory data to refer to novel objects or ideas with novel partners;
- Coordination problem: understanding partners using shared expectations about mappings between linguistic forms and meanings;
- Arbitrariness: there are many possible mappings, as demonstrated by the diversity of human languages;
- Stability: it is more efficient for a community to keep using the same mapping than to generate a new one from scratch during each communicative exchange.
In order to succeed, conventions generally require a bidirectional coordination of expectations during an interaction. For example, both the sender and receiver of a gesture must expect that the other shares their interpretation in order for the behavioral signal to be meaningful.
Conventions apply when it is in everyone’s best interest to coordinate (@2019hawkinsEmergence). In contrast, Prescriptive norms are solutions to problems where coordination may not initially be in all agents’ self-interest.
References
- Lewis (1969), Convention
- @2019hawkinsEmergence, “The emergence of social norms and conventions”