Behavior is Not Enough: A Mechanism-Based Evaluation of Social Norm Emergence in LLM Societies

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.26481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Social norms cannot be identified from behavior alone: the same cooperative equilibrium may reflect shared expectations, strategic incentives, or simple imitation. Yet in multi-agent large language model systems, prior work largely treats behavioral convergence as evidence of norm emergence. In this work, we introduce an evaluation framework that measures agents' reported empirical and normative expectations in addition to behavioral convergence.