Norms and the normative processes that enforce them such as social maintenance are considered fundamental building blocks of human societies, shaping many aspects of our cognition. However, emerging work argues that the building blocks of normativity emerged much earlier in evolution than previously considered. In light of this, we argue that normative processes must be taken into account to consider the evolution of even ancient processes such as affect. We show through an agent-based model (with an evolvable model of affect) that different affective dispositions emerge when taking into account social maintenance. Further, we demonstrate that social maintenance results in the emergence of a minimal population regulation mechanism in a dynamic environment, without the need to predict the state of the environment or reason about the mental state of others. We use a cultural interpretation of our model to derive a new definition of norm emergence which distinguishes between indirect and direct social maintenance. Indirect social maintenance tends to one equilibrium (similar to environmental scaffolding) and the richer direct social maintenance results in many possible equilibria in behaviour, capturing an important aspect of normative behaviour in that it bears a certain degree of arbitrariness. We also distinguish between single-variable and mechanistic normative regularities. A mechanistic regularity, rather than a particular behaviour specified by one value e.g. walking speed, is a collection of values that specify a culturally patterned version of a psychological mechanism e.g. a disposition. This is how culture reprograms entire cognitive and physiological systems.

The social world is replete with norms, an important aspect Going beyond continuous game theory, Aubert-Kato et al. of organising societies. Social norms reduce the degrees (2015) investigated the emergence of frugal and greedy of freedom in the actions of individuals, making them behaviours in an embodied version of a dilemma where more predictable and stabilising societies (FeldmanHall and agents varied in how long they exploited a food source Shenhav, 2019). Norms also enable unrelated agents to - the longer it exploits the food source, the more selfish manage shared resources (Mathew et al., 2013), thereby the agent is. Michaeli and Spiro (2015) showed how extending cooperation beyond genetic relatives (Richerson "liberal" and "conservative" punishment regimes can affect et al., 2016).