We examine the effect of noise on societies of agents using an agent-based model of evolutionary norm emergence. Generally, we see that noisy societies are more selfish, smaller and discontent, and are caught in rounds of perpetual punishment preventing them from flourishing. Surprisingly, despite the detrimental effect of noise on the population, it does not seem to evolve away. In fact, in some cases it seems the level of noise increases. We carry out further analysis and provide reasons for why this might be the case. Furthermore, we claim that our framework that evolves the noise/ambiguity of norms is a new way to model the tight/loose framework of norms, suggesting that despite ambiguous norms’ detrimental effect on society, evolution does not favour clarity.

This is an erratum to The Effect of Noise on the Emergence of Continuous Norms and its Evolutionary Dynamics , published in the Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Artificial Life. After publication, we discovered an error in the mutation operator. In this correction, we will describe the error, outline what dynamics would produce the results we initially presented, and then compare them with simulation results with the mutation operator working as described in the original paper. We go through the claims of the original paper, discussing any possible differences in the outcomes. Overall, the main results of the paper still hold, although with some minor differences.