Abstract

Consider democracy, money, and family. Diverse as they are, they are all institutions – human-made cultural artefacts that are fundamental to a human living in contemporary society. As we move deeper into the 21st century CE, we are experiencing the changing institutional landscape. How can we understand this institutional transformation to better navigate ourselves into the future? In such diverse social science disciplines as sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, institutions are typically understood as regularities of human social behaviours or rules of conduct informally or formally adhered to and sanctioned in society. Often called neo-institutionalism, this broad understanding of human sociality has become a major, if not dominant, theoretical perspective in many social science disciplines. However, the psychological underpinnings of institutions – how individual citizens interact with institutions and participate in their formation, maintenance, or transformation – have not been investigated fully. We aim to deepen our understanding of the evolution and devolution of institutions by developing cognitively rich social agents that can form and transform institutions. Through empirical observation of digital information behaviour and psychological experimentation, we examine how individuals interface with institutions from psychological viewpoints, and ask how they generate, select, and come to regard some behavioural regularities and rules of conduct as institutions, and conversely, how they begin to dismantle them. Combining these empirical insights with agent-based social simulation, we develop an integrative understanding of how behavioural regularities and rules of conduct become institutionalized and deinstitutionalized through ongoing discursive social processes.

Please note. The subtitle was primarily generated by AI in collaboration with human review and may contain some errors.