The fastest supercomputer on Earth simulated human behavior based on social norms

Japanese scientists fed our social norms to the fastest supercomputer on Earth to simulate how they affect human behavior. It found that we thrive in small communities.

What makes us want to cooperate and help others? Social scholars believe that social norms are at the core of this need.

Social norms are unwritten rules that guide behavior and expectations within a group or community. They’re based on shared beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, and what people think is normal, typical, or appropriate.

People partly cooperate to build a positive reputation, which can benefit them in future interactions. For example, when they donate to charities, it may not just be out of altruism but also to enhance or maintain their social status.

The link between cooperation and social status depends on the community's norms. Some communities enforce strict rules on behavior and judgment, while others are more relaxed. The norms themselves are not permanent and can evolve over time.

This can be explained through evolutionary theory. Norms that are beneficial or effectively enforced tend to persist, while harmful or unsupported norms are likely to fade away.

To shed more light on how and why people cooperate, a research group from the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (Japan) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (Germany) ran large-scale simulations on the world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku.

They fed the supercomputer with 2,080 social norms to study reputation dynamics. Such a scale of simulations was not possible before due to the limitation of computational powers.

The findings suggest that the structure of a population significantly influences which social norms prevail and how durable cooperation is. The simulations showed that cooperation thrives in small communities.

If the population consists of a single well-mixed community, it’s harder for people to be willing to cooperate. However, if the population is subdivided into several smaller communities, cooperative norms evolve more easily.