Page 41 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

24 Socially Intelligent Agents

behaviour and action. Research on an ’everyday theory of mind’, for instance,
studies how people relate perceptions, thinking, beliefs, feelings, desires, in-
tentions and sensations, and reason about these [2] [18] [29] [17] [16]. The
ways in which people attribute and reason about emotions of other people have
been studied within appraisal theory [13] [28] [31] - for overview, see [4].
At yet a higher level, people understand intelligent behaviour in terms of
personality, which refers to dimensions of a person that are assumed to be more
stable and enduring than folk-psychological mental states. People may, for
instance use a common-sense theory about traits to explain the behaviour of
other people [23] (Per’s tendency to be late is often explained by Jarmo and
Peter by referring to ’his carelessness’). People also have sophisticated folk-
theories about social roles and expectations about the behaviours of these roles
in specific situations, for instance family roles (father, mother, daughter), oc-
cupancy roles (fireman, doctor, waiter), social stereotypes, gender stereotypes,
ethnic stereotypes or even archetypes of fictions and narratives (the imbecile,
the hypochondriac, Santa Clause). Social roles are studied within social psy-
chology, sociology, anthropology, ethnology and communication studies e.g.,
[32, p. 91] [21, p. 39].
In addition to these folk-theories, people also expect intelligent agents not
only to be responsive to input, but to proactively take action on the basis of
the agent’s assumed goals, desires and emotions - cf. Dennett’s, [8] distinction
between mechanical and intentional stance. To a certain extent we also expect
intelligent agents to be able to learn new things in light of old knowledge, or
to apply old knowledge to new contexts. This, in fact, seems to be one of the
central features of human intelligence.
Finally, people expect intelligent creatures to pay special attention to other
intelligent creatures in the environment, and be able to relate to the point of
view of those individuals. Defined broadly, people expect intelligent creatures
to have emphatic capabilities (cf. [4]). This may include perceptual processes
(being able to follow the user’s gaze; cf., [11], cognitive processes (inferring the
goals and emotions of the user) as well as ’true’ emotional empathy (not only
attributing a mental state to a person, but also sharing that emotion or belief, or
some congruent one).

2.2 Features of Folk-Theories
Folk-theories about social intelligence are not idiosyncratic bits and pieces
of common sense wisdom, but constitute coherent cognitive networks of inter-
related entities, shared by a large number of people. Folk-theories are structures
that organize our understanding and interaction with other intelligent creature.
If a given behaviour can be understood in terms of folk-theoretical expecta-
tions, then it is experienced as ’meaningful’. If some aspect of the situation