Your culture isn't something you're born into; it's a loop you're accidentally building every day.
April 15, 2026
Original Paper
Social Reality Construction via Active Inference: Modeling the Dialectic of Conformity and Creativity
arXiv · 2604.09026
The Takeaway
We usually think of 'social norms' as fixed rules passed down through generations. This simulation shows that culture actually emerges from a constant, circular tension. We try to fit in (conformity), but we also project our own unique actions (creativity). When everyone does this at once, a 'shared reality' spontaneously forms out of nowhere. It means culture isn't a museum we live in; it's a 'living hallucination' that only exists because we are all trying to balance being ourselves with being like everyone else. Culture is a process, not a destination.
From the abstract
Social agents both internalize collective norms and reshape them through creative action, yet computational models have not captured this bidirectional process within a unified framework. We propose a multi-agent simulation model grounded in active inference that formalizes the dialectical constitution of social reality on a structured social network. Each agent maintains an internal generative model, communicates with neighbors to form social priors, creates novel observations, and selectively