Social Actions and Influences: An extended abstract
Henry H. Hexmoor · 2002
We strive to engineer agent-based systems with a high level of independence for agents yet allow indirect control over agents by manipulating social influences. Social actions such as a call for help or a delegation action produce social influences. Social factors are inter-related and an initial social influence due to a social action often produces secondary influences. We are designing agents whose actions are guided by social values and norms as well as a set of relationships among the agent’s social parameters. Elsewhere, we have discussed social influences over autonomy and this work generalizes that to other social influences [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Social action might be an action by one agent toward another, a mutual action of two agents, or a bilateral action by two agents. For simplicity, we limit our attention to the actions that commonly cause the influence as actions over the following notions: Help, Permission, Delegation, Service, and Resources. Help is an action performed to aid someone in her task and it might be provided, withheld, requested, or rejected. Common actions over Permission are to request, to grant, to deny, and to withdraw. Delegation might be issued, accepted, or rejected. Service is an action but unlike help that is pro-active, it is usually passive. Service should be requested. It might be given or denied. Resources might be requested, offered, rejected, taken away, or prevented. Let’s refer to the set of social actions as A. Social influences can be in several dimensions including the following: dependence, autonomy, control, power, and obligation. Let’s refer to the set of influences as I. We define function f that maps the agent’s current beliefs B, a set of currently active values V, a set N of currently active norms, and a set of social actions A to a set of influences I: f: B x V x N x A AE I. An example is delegation of homework by a teacher to a student, which following norms of teacher-student relationships produce the influence of student obligation to carry out the homework. We said that social influences might be in the context of norms and values. An agent might have several levels of such values and norms at any one time. Obligations to uphold the ultimate group intent are derived from corresponding values and norms at the global level. These obligations may compete against an agent’s social influences at lower levels. Let’s differentiate values and norms for an agent into n levels with level 1 being the highest (i.e., ultimate) and levels n being the lowest. Values and norms will be labeled with their level as values V