Internalization is at study in social-behavioural sciences and moral philosophy since long; of late, the debate was revamped within the rationality approach to the study of cooperation and compliance since internalization is a less costly and more reliable enforcement system than social control. But how does it work? So far, poor attention was paid to the mental underpinnings of internalization. Our work advocates a rich cognitive model of different types, degrees and factors of internalization.
In order to check the individual and social effect of internalization, we have adapted an existing agent architecture, EMIL-I-A, providing it with internalization capabilities, turning it into EMIL-I-A.
Moreover, and as specified by Axelrod in his seminal work "An Evolutionary Approach to Norms'', punishment is a key mechanism in a self-regulated society to achieve the necessary social control and to impose certain norms. In our work, we distinguish between punishment and sanction, focusing on the specific ways in which these two different mechanisms affect the EMIL-I-A architecture and favor the emergence of cooperation and the spreading of social norms within a social system.
Experiments with the EMIL-I-A architecture have proven satisfactory results with respect to the maintenance of cooperation in a different simulations (such as the Prisoners Dilemma or the Pepi's Problem).