106,231 research outputs found

    Talking Nets: A Multi-Agent Connectionist Approach to Communication and Trust between Individuals

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    A multi-agent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other, and as such is a network of networks. The individual recurrent networks simulate the process of information uptake, integration and memorization within individual agents, while the communication of beliefs and opinions between agents is propagated along connections between the individual networks. A crucial aspect in belief updating based on information from other agents is the trust in the information provided. In the model, trust is determined by the consistency with the receiving agents’ existing beliefs, and results in changes of the connections between individual networks, called trust weights. Thus activation spreading and weight change between individual networks is analogous to standard connectionist processes, although trust weights take a specific function. Specifically, they lead to a selective propagation and thus filtering out of less reliable information, and they implement Grice’s (1975) maxims of quality and quantity in communication. The unique contribution of communicative mechanisms beyond intra-personal processing of individual networks was explored in simulations of key phenomena involving persuasive communication and polarization, lexical acquisition, spreading of stereotypes and rumors, and a lack of sharing unique information in group decisions

    The effectiveness of the international strategy in the analysis of the political language: Berlusconi´s speech at the chamber of deputies on the 13TH May 2008

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    In this context we will oversee to understand if and in which measure, the intentional attitude delineated today by the school of Anglo-Saxon thought and, in particular, by Dennett’s philosophy, can constitute an opportune and effective instrument for the analysis of the public language. With the expression “intentional system” we refer to the addressee of the communicative enterprise: a collectivity of people joined by the sharing a physical space and a temporal time; such a system can be explained, rationalized and, possibly, anticipated (as for its actions and to its behaviors) through the attribution to it of shared convictions and desires, which constitute the common sense of that organism. The so delineated philosophy of intentionality becomes, in this within, hermeneutics of the speech held by the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to the Chamber of Deputies on May, 13 2008, that is in occasion of the beginning of its IV legislature. The exposure of the former prime Minister insisted, in order to guarantee to his own government the necessary consent, on the baggage of convictions and desires shared by the Italians, in an historical moment of confusion and political-institutional instability. That speech evidenced proper values of the cultural and ideological matrix of Italy: the house, the family, the entrepreneurial increase of North, the elimination of the organized crime in the South, the tax reduction on the job of the entrepreneurs, individual safety, the removal of the material causes of the abortion. Such concepts were introduced in order to attract the interest of a conservative public opinion and to diverge the attention from the substance of that government’s action, that realized itself in a plan of drastic reduction of the job in Public Administration and of increase of the tax charge, in the picture of a progressive and general economic recess

    A Pragmatic Study of Female and Male Discourse Use on Facebook

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    La comunicación virtual es un campo de estudio muy interesante e innovador que analiza las distintas estrategias comunicativas empleadas en este tipo de discurso que difieren de las empleadas en la comunicación verbal. Este trabajo empieza revisando investigaciones precedentes en este tema para posteriormente analizar, desde un punto de vista pragmático, las diferencias del uso del discurso femenino y masculino en Facebook, sin caer en una perspectiva sexista. El problema principal en este estudio ha sido intentar establecer dicha comparación. Para poder acometer este estudio, recurrimos primero al análisis descriptivo de un corpus creado con discursos reales sacados de la propia red social, para elaborar un cuestionario Likert de 5 puntos, y poder realizar así un estudio experimental que nos permitiera probar si los marcadores textuales utilizados por hombres y mujeres difieren en sus respectivos discursos. Los resultados revelaron una diferencia estadísticamente significativa entre ambos tipos de discursos al comunicarse en Facebook. Sin embargo, también obtuvimos algunos resultados inesperados en relación al uso de los marcadores discursivos utilizados por el grupo de mujeres jóvenes que eran muy parecidos a los utilizados por los hombres en ambas condiciones, tanto en los jóvenes como en los adultos. Por esta razón, la conclusión es que existen rasgos distintivos en los usos discursivos femeninos y masculinos, aunque en el caso de las mujeres jóvenes su discurso parece estar cambiando, puesto que se asemeja cada vez más al discurso masculino. No obstante, sería necesario llevar a cabo una investigación sobre el cambio discursivo de las mujeres jóvenes para tratar de establecer sus causas.Virtual communication is an interesting and innovative field study which analyses the communicative strategies used in this type of discourse, different from the ones used in face-to-face communication. This work first reviews some previous research on the topic to then analyse from a pragmatic perspective the differences between female and male discoursre uses on Facebook, without succumbing to a sexist perspective. To carry out this analysis, we resorted to a corpus made with real conversations from Facebook to elaborate a 5-pint Likert scale, and so conduct an experimental survey to test whether women and men actually use different discourse markers in their respective discourses. The results revealed that there was a statistically significant distinction in the female and male discourse use when communicating on Facebook. However, some unexpected results were also obtained regarding the discourse markers used by women in the female young adult group condition, which were very similar to those used by men in both the young adult and adult condition. Hence, the conclusion is that there are distinctive features of both female and male discourse use that allow us to identify the two different gender identities, though young women’s discourse use seems to be changing and increasingly resembling to the male discourse. Further research is needed to shed some more light on the change of discourse use found in young women to try to determine its causes.31 páginas y anex

    Opinion Polarization by Learning from Social Feedback

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    We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social environment, is treated as a positive feedback which reinforces the value associated to this opinion. In connected networks of sufficiently high modularity, different groups of agents can form strong convictions of competing opinions. Linking the social feedback process to standard equilibrium concepts we analytically characterize sufficient conditions for the stability of bi-polarization. While previous models have emphasized the polarization effects of deliberative argument-based communication, our model highlights an affective experience-based route to polarization, without assumptions about negative influence or bounded confidence.Comment: Presented at the Social Simulation Conference (Dublin 2017

    Lifestyles and consumer behavior

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    In this article, the concept of lifestyle is traced to its early roots in personality psychology and in marketing. In the latter field, many commercial marketing firms have made strong claims as to the explanatory power of lifestyle dimensions, often based on procedures which have been kept secret, but researchers have seldom been able to verify such claims. In spite of this, the approach is very popular, has wide credibility and is often given very favorable media coverage. Probably because of this, it is often considered as a very important and promising approach by administrators working with the regulation of risk and risk communication. It may also be credible in some quarters because it affords a way of ‘explaining’ risk perception as being non-rational. In this paper, we give results from an empirical study of nuclear waste risk perception which is related to a basic risk perception model and three approaches to lifestyles: Kahle’s List of Values, a Swedish adaptation of the ‘Agorame´trie’ approach suggested by a group of French researchers, and Dake and Wildavsky’s Cultural Theory dimensions. It was found that nuclear waste risk perception could be modeled successfully with risk attitudes and perception data (basic model about 65% of the variance explained), but that lifestyle dimensions added virtually nothing to the explanatory power of the model.consumer behavior; lifestyle; risk

    Machine Understanding of Human Behavior

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    A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. If this prediction is to come true, then next generation computing, which we will call human computing, should be about anticipatory user interfaces that should be human-centered, built for humans based on human models. They should transcend the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating certain human behaviors such as affective and social signaling. This article discusses a number of components of human behavior, how they might be integrated into computers, and how far we are from realizing the front end of human computing, that is, how far are we from enabling computers to understand human behavior
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