[D] Multi-Agent RL meets Sociology: Why "silly rules" exist in society - Spurious normativity enhances learning of compliance and enforcement behavior in artificial agents (Paper Explained & Author Interview)

[https://youtu.be/6dvcYx9hcbE](https://youtu.be/6dvcYx9hcbE)

This is an in-depth paper review, followed by an interview with the papers' authors!

Society is ruled by norms, and most of these norms are very useful, such as washing your hands before cooking. However, there also exist plenty of social norms which are essentially arbitrary, such as what hairstyles are acceptable, or what words are rude. These are called "silly rules". This paper uses multi-agent reinforcement learning to investigate why such silly rules exist. Their results indicate a …

agents artificial compliance interview learning machinelearning paper rl rules society sociology