Social Exposure Increases Signaling through the Weight of Precedent

Establish that, for agents acting under the theory of appropriateness, social exposure to others’ behaviors, possessions, and conversations increases the probability of selecting a status-signaling action relative to baseline. Formally, given a status-signaling action a_s, an alternative action a_ns, and a context c with baseline probability p(a_s | c) in the absence of social memories, prove that adding memories m_s derived from observed signals increases the likelihood of choosing the status-signaling action so that p(a_s | c, m_s) > p(a_s | c).

Background

The paper advances a computational theory of status signaling grounded in the theory of appropriateness, proposing that agents act via predictive pattern completion and adjust their preferences through social observation and imitation. Within this framework, the authors formalize a central hypothesis as a conjecture linking social exposure to increased propensity for status-signaling actions.

The conjecture precisely states a probabilistic inequality capturing the predicted effect of social exposure on action selection, defining the relevant variables and situating the claim as the core mechanism underlying observed Veblen effects, preference shifts, and the diffusion of signaling behaviors in their generative agent simulations.