The Influence of Social Norms and Social Consciousness on Intention Reconciliation

Research on resource-bounded agents has established that rational agents need to be able to revise their commitments in light of new opportunities. In the context of collaborative activities, rational agents must be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. The SPIRE experimental system allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. Initial work with SPIRE examined the impact of environmental factors and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes in the context of one set of social norms governing collaboration. This paper extends those results by further studying the effect of environmental factors and the agents' level of social consciousness and by comparing the impact of two different types of social norms on agent behavior and outcomes. The results show that the choice of social norms influences the accuracy of the agents' responses to varying environmental factors, as well as the effectiveness of social consciousness and other aspects of agents' utility functions. In experiments using heterogeneous groups of agents, both sets of norms were susceptible to the free-rider effect. However, the gains of the less responsible agents were minimal, suggesting that agent designers would have little incentive to design agents that deviate from the standard level of responsibility to the group.Engineering and Applied Science

ROLE OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOCIO-CULTURAL DETERMINATION OF PERSONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Цель. Статья посвящена значимой для современной духовной ситуации в обществе теме соотношения и взаимодействия индивидуального и общественного сознаний. Предмет анализа – воздействие общественного сознания на сознание личности. Цель статьи составляют интерпретация взаимодействия коллективного и индивидуального разумов, а также поиск структурных элементов общественного сознания, детерминирующих сознание личности.Методология. За основу работы авторами взяты компаративный метод, метод структурного анализа, а также социально-феноменологический подход и принцип сведения индивидуального к социальному.Результаты. Результаты работы заключаются в том, что авторы с опорой на социально-феноменологический подход интерпретируют взаимодействие персонального и общественного сознаний. Последнее рассматривается ими через понятие социального конструирования реальности, то есть коллективной деятельности по продуцированию и дальнейшей объективации и институализации идей, социальных норм и ценностей, составляющих базис социальности. Также авторы выявляют несколько элементов духовной жизни общества, влияющих на сознание индивидов, среди которых общественная психология, массовая культура, групповое сознание.Область применения результатов. Результаты исследования могут быть применены в сферах культурной, образовательной и социальной политики.Purpose. The article is devoted to important for contemporary spiritual situation in a society theme of correlation and interaction of individual and social consciousness. The subject of analysis is the impact of social consciousness to the consciousness of the person. The purpose of the article make the interpretation of the interaction of collective and individual minds also searching of the structural elements of social consciousness, determining the consciousness of the person.Methodology. The comparative method, structural analysis method, as well as socio-phenomenological approach and the principle of reducing the individual to the social were taken by the authors for the basis of the work.Results. The results concluded that the authors drawing on socio-phenomenological approach interprets the interaction of personal and social consciousness. The last thing is considered by them through the concept of the social construction of reality, that is, collective action by the production and further objectification and institutionalization of ideas, social norms and values that make up the basis of sociality. Also, the authors identify several elements of the spiritual life of society, influencing the consciousness of individuals, including social psychology, mass culture, group consciousness.Practical implications. The results of the study can be applied in the spheres of culture, education and social policy

Trust, Privacy, and Frame Problems in Social and Business E-Networks, Part 1

Privacy issues in social and business e-networks are daunting in complexity— private information about oneself might be routed through countless artificial agents. For each such agent, in that context, two questions about trust are raised: Where an agent must access (or store) personal information, can one trust that artificial agent with that information and, where an agent does not need to either access or store personal information, can one trust that agent not to either access or store that information? It would be an infeasible task for any human being to explicitly determine, for each artificial agent, whether it can be trusted. That is, no human being has the computational resources to make such an explicit determination. There is a well-known class of problems in the artificial intelligence literature, known as frame problems, where explicit solutions to them are computationally infeasible. Human common sense reasoning solves frame problems, though the mechanisms employed are largely unknown. I will argue that the trust relation between two agents (human or artificial) functions, in some respects, is a frame problem solution. That is, a problem is solved without the need for a computationally infeasible explicit solution. This is an aspect of the trust relation that has remained unexplored in the literature. Moreover, there is a formal, iterative structure to agent-agent trust interactions that serves to establish the trust relation non-circularly, to reinforce it, and to “bootstrap” its strength