Emergence and enforcement of social behavior
Virginia Dignum · 2009
Abstract: Complex social systems require an understanding of individuals, networks, institutions and cultures. Where regulations assure efficient coordination between individuals and groups and their needs and requirements, cultural and personality differences result in different behaviors and interpretations of global aims. Due to the dynamic mechanisms of social interaction, this results in a cyclic pattern with norms enforcing behavior and behavior generating norms. Current modeling tools often only consider one or the other direction of this cycle. I.e. one can either design systems where individual behavior is ‘forced ’ to adhere to institutional norms, or analyze the emergence of global behavior resulting from ‘free ’ individual behaviors. In this paper, we propose a framework for the design and analysis of social systems that integrates a top-down (prescription of behavior) view with a bottom-up (description of behavior) view. Such models enable the understanding of patterns of influence between individual behavior and social norms and vice-versa. For the social organization, the framework is based on the OperA model that enables the representation of groups and organizations in a way that guarantees independence from individual architectures but enables individual interpretations and the emergence of regulation patterns. For the individual level, the framework uses the BRIDGE agent architecture, a modular cognitive agent architecture that extends BDI models with modules