Control over emergence
Martin Helmhout · 2008
Abstract. This paper explains and demonstrates emergence of organisational behaviour as a social cognitive mechanism, i.e. ones own behaviour at the cognitive level is influenced by interaction with others at the social level. Besides the importance of understanding how behaviour evolves, it is probably more crucial to control emergence or enforce desired behaviour. In our research we demonstrate this by implementing social constructs as regulators or stimuli of behaviour. The paper discusses a social cognitive architecture ACT-RBot or in short RBot 4 which is based on ACT-R. RBot inherits the cognitive architecture (production system) of ACT-R but provides also a mechanism of social constructs as meta-productions that operates as a social (control) layer. The architecture is implemented in software agents who ‘live ‘ in a discrete event simulation environment allowing them to interact and exchange signs. The combination of RBot and a simulation environment provides observation of behaviour between agents (at the social level), but also introspection of the experiences of the individual agent stored in memory of its cognitive architecture. We describe two simulation experiments that demonstrate the working of the social cognitive architecture. The first experiment shows that emergence is present at the cognitive (individual) and social level (interaction). The second experiment adds social constructs and authority that allows for (more) control over emergence. 1