Page 40 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Understanding Social Intelligence 23

2. Folk-Theories: ’Naive’ Theories about Intelligence

There is reason to believe that people employ the same or similar psycholog-
ical and social strategies when making sense of artificially produced intelligent
behaviour as with real world intelligence (e.g., humans and animals). There
might be some minor variations in reception dependent on media (computer,
theatre, film or in everyday situations), or if the intelligence is thought to be
fictive/simulated or real/documentary - but the major bulk of employed psy-
chosocial skills will overlap (in the case of cinema characters, see [25]). We
will call such skills folk-theories, since they are knowledge and hypotheses
about the world, albeit of a ’naive’ and common-sense nature. People and cul-
tures employ such naive theories in many areas of everyday life, e.g., physics,
nature, psychology, energy, morality, causality, time and space [12]; [9]. For
our purposes, we will deal only with folk-theories about intelligent behaviour,
interpersonal situations, and social reality.
Although people have idiosyncratic expectations about intelligent behaviour,
forinstancespecificknowledgeaboutthepersonalityandhabitsofaclose friend,
folk-theories constitute the collectively shared knowledge in a social, cultural
or universal group of people. Folk-theories constitute users’ expectations about
intelligent behaviour. In order for the system to appear intelligent, it must meet
those expectations, at least on some level.
Elsewherewehavedescribedthese folk-theories in detail and given examples
of SIA systems that seek to accommodate these [26]. Here space allows only a
brief overview.

2.1 Examples of Folk-Theories
If intelligenceisembodiedinsomeform, thenpeoplehaveexpectations about
visual appearance and physical behaviour. People have visual expectations of
bodies’ configuration, arrangement and movement patterns, both in humans
and other forms of intelligent life [10]. People expect gestures and non-verbal
behaviour to be synchronized and appropriate to the situation in which they
occur [24] [6]. Behaviour related to gazing and personal space is also expected
to take place according to certain norms and conventions [7].
Surface behaviour of this kind, however, is never understood on its own.
Users will always try to make sense of such behaviour in more abstract terms.
Primitive psychology is a folk-theory about how basic needs such as hunger,
thirst, sexual drives, and pain work, and the different ways in which they are
related (e.g., hunger or thirst will disappear if satisfied, and that satisfaction
will fade over time until hunger or thirst reoccur). Folk-psychology constitutes
a common sense model about how people understand the interrelationships
between different sorts of mental states in other people (and in themselves),
and how these can be employed as common-sense explanations for external