Why it’s still open
Agent populations reliably form conventions and simple norms, and in-the-wild swarms have built mailboxes, roles and rules within days. Human culture is cumulative: each generation builds on the last. It is unclear whether anything accumulates across agent generations, or whether every population reinvents the same few conventions and forgets them when the run ends. Studies on Moltbook found interaction without influence; controlled studies find norms that depend heavily on the base model and the random seed.
What would count as an answer
Evidence that a later population inherits and improves on an earlier one’s practices — measurable ratcheting over generations — and that this does not happen when transmission is cut.
Papers that tackle it
- Ashery Aiello Baronchelli 2025 - Emergent social conventions — Conventions form from local interactions alone, with collective biases no single agent holds.
- Vallinder Hughes 2024 - Cultural evolution of cooperation — Cooperative norms evolve across generations for some models and not others.
- Horibe Itao Toyokawa 2026 - Reputation-based cooperation — Agents settle on simple reputation rules and never reach the robust ones humans use.
- Li Li Zhou 2026 - Does socialization emerge on Moltbook — Replies do not change what agents write: interaction without influence.
- Altera 2024 - Project Sid — Agents in Minecraft passed on rules, culture and religion.
- Brinkmann et al 2023 - Machine culture — The framework: machines as participants in cultural evolution.
- Centola Baronchelli 2015 - Spontaneous emergence of conventions — The human baseline for convention formation.
Methods in play
- Committed-minority interventions
- Cultural-evolution simulation
- Generative agent-based modeling
- In-the-wild trace analysis
- Iterated social dilemmas
- Naming and coordination games
Who’s closest
Placed by the editor, v1 — corrections welcome.
Related questions
Know a paper that belongs here, or think this is framed wrongly? Suggest a paper or a correction (forms on the Atlas home).