Socially Responsive Agents: A Foundation for Linking the Micro with the Macro

How do micro-level social interactions give rise to macro-level social structures such as norms, schemas, and power hierarchies? This paper introduces the concept of the socially responsive agent—a formal, procedural model of social action grounded in symbolic interactionism, structuration theory, and social learning theory. Socially responsive agents interpret and adapt their behavior based on symbolically mediated feedback, enabling the endogenous emergence of shared norms, cultural schemas, and hierarchical influence structures.By embedding meaning-making and symbolic evaluation into a dynamic feedback loop, the model bridges formal modeling with core insights from cultural and interpretive sociology. It offers a micro-foundational account of social reproduction and transformation that clarifies the procedural “how” underlying the sociological “why.”Crucially, the framework is designed to support cumulative theory building. Companion papers systematically extend the model to account for increasingly complex social phenomena—progressing from behavioral norm emergence to schema convergence and power asymmetries—demonstrating how formal models can incrementally incorporate interpretive, structural, and symbolic dimensions of social life.