A Road Toward Reflective Normative Agents

An ‘Interdisciplinary Frontier’ of norm research has brought forward new theories and evidence that describe the conditions required for norms to be measured, represented, spread, and changed. These inform the requirements for a normative agent with mental representations, able to reason about models of self, others, environment, and society. Recent Socio-Cognitive theories of reflection have highlighted the need for high-level reasoning processes to assess whether one's actions are congruent with prevailing norms and to reason about the legitimacy of the norm, which may motivate intentional transgression. Agents lacking these capacities engage merely in passive norm following or compliance, unable to explore the richness of social constructivism. In contrast, my research proposes reflective normative agents that utilize cognitive abilities to decide whether to conform, transgress, or change the rules of their institutions autonomously and collectively.