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Behavior is Not Enough: A Mechanism-Based Evaluation of Social Norm Emergence in LLM Societies

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 22, 2026 · UTC

Social norms cannot be identified from behavior alone: the same cooperative equilibrium may reflect shared expectations, strategic incentives, or simple imitation. Yet in multi-agent large language model systems, prior work largely treats behavioral convergence as evidence of norm emergence. In this work, we introduce an evaluation framework that measures agents' reported empirical and normative expectations in addition to behavioral convergence. Through controlled ablations, we test the effect of expectation elicitation and isolate two collective mechanisms central to theories of norm formati

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