Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Norm entrepreneurs
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Cass R. Sunstein, Social Norms and Social Roles (1996)
Individuals or groups who deliberately campaign to change a norm — making the previously unsayable sayable — and can trigger cascades in which the whole population flips.
Analysis
The first benchmark installs Sunstein's mechanism by name: one agent publicly dissents from a false consensus and the study counts how often the rest follow, with cascades succeeding under 26% of the time for seven of eight models, never for one and 48% for GPT-4o. What is carried over is the bare act of dissent, not the campaign, since the entrepreneur speaks once into a scenario invented for the occasion, with no repetition over time and no norm with any history to move. Nothing in the approach is governed by an entrepreneur; the mechanism exists so that model populations can be scored against it.
Committed-minority tipping
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Empirical norm dynamics
A small group that refuses to budge can, past a threshold, flip the majority's convention. Custom is not only majority rule: an unwavering minority is a live force in how norms move.
Analysis
A committed minority that always pushes one way is injected into populations of security-triage monitors, and a response function calibrated on adversary-free operation forecasts how far it will move them. The threshold is what is missing: the paper reports a graded response, weak attacks neutralized by shared reasoning and strong ones merely delayed, then the population drifting back once the committed agents are removed, so nothing tips and stays tipped. The minority moves behavior without ever flipping a convention, because these populations hold no convention to flip.
Prescription and desuetude
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Edmund Burke (1790); civil-law doctrine
Customs gain authority from long usage (prescription) and lose it by falling out of use (desuetude). Age and practice — not enactment — are what make a custom binding, and what unmake it.
Analysis
In all three benchmarks the norm is in force because the scenario says so: SCENE scripts personas who follow a hidden norm and sanction breaches, and the pluralistic-ignorance set stipulates 5 authority levels across its 100 scenarios. Nothing gathers force through repetition and nothing lapses through disuse; the nearest thing, a captured population drifting back to where it began, is a behavior relaxing rather than a norm losing authority. The first paper does reach for norm persistence, but its claim is that simulations overstate stability, which concerns whether a norm holds, not whether time made it binding.