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.

翻译：规范及其强制执行的社会维护等规范性过程被视为人类社会的基本构建模块，塑造着我们认知的诸多方面。然而，新兴研究认为规范性的构建模块在进化史上出现的时间远早于既往认知。鉴于此，我们认为即使对于情感这类古老过程的演化，也必须将规范性过程纳入考量。我们通过基于智能体的模型（配备可进化的情感模型）证明，当考虑社会维护因素时，会涌现出不同的情感倾向。进一步研究表明，在动态环境中，社会维护能够催生最小化的种群调节机制，而无需预测环境状态或推断他人心理状态。通过对模型的文化阐释，我们提出了规范涌现的新定义，区分了间接与直接社会维护。间接社会维护倾向于单一均衡态（类似于环境支架），而更丰富的直接社会维护则会产生多种可能的行为均衡态，这捕捉到规范性行为的重要特征——其承载着某种程度的任意性。我们还区分了单变量规范规律与机制性规范规律。机制性规律并非由单一数值（如步行速度）规定的特定行为，而是指规定心理机制（如情感倾向）文化模式化形态的数值集合。正是通过这种方式，文化实现了对整个认知与生理系统的重编程。