behavioremerging

Behavioremerging refers to the process by which distinct actors, systems, or communities converge toward similar behavioral patterns over time, driven by repeated interaction, shared environments, or common objectives.

In sociology and anthropology, behavior merging describes diffusion of norms and practices within social networks, often via imitation, social learning, or normative pressure. In organizational contexts, standardization of workflows or compliance requirements can lead to convergent practices. In artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems, agents trained under common objectives or exposed to shared data distributions tend to adopt similar policies or routines, a phenomenon sometimes described as policy convergence.

Researchers measure convergence using distributional similarity of actions, such as entropy or divergence metrics, over time, or by tracking the alignment of decision rules across agents. Convergence can improve coordination and predictability, reduce conflict, and simplify management, but may also reduce behavioral diversity, create vulnerability to systemic shocks, or propagate biases.

Examples include the spread of work practices in organizations, consumer behavior patterns under similar interfaces, or robots in a shared environment adopting common navigation strategies. The term emphasizes that convergence is an emergent property of interaction structures and incentive alignments rather than a single causal mechanism.

See also: diffusion of innovations, social conformity, norm diffusion, multi-agent reinforcement learning, cultural evolution.