Who are the others?

Restorative nostalgia, social norms and social control in human–machine environments

Matías Deneken

Department of Methodology · London School of Economics and Political Science

September 2026

Motivation

Norms rest on what we believe others think, do and would sanction.

The puzzle

Norms can hold for decades — and collapse overnight

The gap between what people think and what they say can last a long time and break suddenly when perceptions of others shift (Kuran, 1995)
When an event reveals a stigmatised view to be more popular than believed, people voice it more and sanction it less (Álvarez-Benjumea & Winter, 2020; Bursztyn et al., 2020)
What changes is the belief about others, not necessarily one’s own attitude

This literature treats social signals as information about people. That assumption is no longer innocuous.

A new condition

Some of “the others” are not who they appear to be

Voices

Opinions

posted by automated accounts that look like ordinary users

Counters

Approval

inflated by artificial votes — a quantified norm that can be forged

Sanctions

Removals

executed by a system on behalf of others, under rules written by people

Language models make fabricated crowds cheap (Schroeder et al., 2026)
Bots may shift less what people think than their confidence to say it — a route into the spiral of silence (Tsvetkova et al., 2024)
Bail (2024) proposes using generative AI to reconstruct “social sense”; this thesis inverts the question

Research question

What remains of social norms and social control when “the others” include artificial agents?

RQ1 · Weight

How much does an artificial voice count in each inference a norm depends on?

RQ2 · Behaviour

How does it change the willingness to speak and to sanction?

RQ3 · System

When is that weight enough to tip the norm at the collective level?

Theory

Social order as a problem of expectations and sanctions — and the assumption that the others are human.

Thank you

PhD programme funded by the Chilean Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation · Folio 72260034

References

Álvarez-Benjumea, A., & Winter, F. (2020). The breakdown of antiracist norms: A natural experiment on hate speech after terrorist attacks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(37), 22800–22804. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007977117

Bail, C. A. (2024). Can generative AI improve social science? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(21), e2314021121.

Black, D. (1984). Social control as a dependent variable. In D. Black (Ed.), Toward a general theory of social control (Vol. 1, pp. 1–36). Academic Press.

Bursztyn, L., Egorov, G., & Fiorin, S. (2020). From extreme to mainstream: The erosion of social norms. American Economic Review, 110(11), 3522–3548. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20171175

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Horne, C. (2009). The rewards of punishment: A relational theory of norm enforcement. Stanford University Press.

Kuran, T. (1995). Private truths, public lies: The social consequences of preference falsification. Harvard University Press.

Parsons, T. (1937). The structure of social action. McGraw-Hill.

Schroeder, D. T. et al. (2026). How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy. Science, 391, 354–357.

Tsvetkova, M., Yasseri, T., Pescetelli, N., & Werner, T. (2024). A new sociology of humans and machines. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(10), 1864–1876.