Page 42 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Understanding Social Intelligence 25

falls outside the interrelationships of the folk-theories, then the behaviour is
judged to be ’incomprehensible’, ’strange’, ’crazy’ or ’different’ in some form.
This often happens in, for instance, inter-cultural clashes. Albeit such mis-
understandings are due to social and cultural variations of folk-theories, most
folk-theories probably possess some form of universal core shared by all cul-
tures [25, p. 226].
From an evolutionary point of view, folk-theories about intelligence are quite
useful to an organism, since their structured nature enables reasoning and pre-
dictions about future behaviour of other organisms (see e.g. [2]). Such predic-
tions are naive and unreliable, but surely provide better hypotheses than random
guesses, and thus carry an evolutionary value.
Folk-theories are not static but change and transform through history. The
popularised versions of psychoanalysis, for instance, perhaps today constitute
folk-theoretical frameworks that quite a few people make use of when trying to
understand the everyday behaviours of others.
Folk-theories are acquired by individuals on the basis of first-person deduc-
tion from encounters with other people, but perhaps more importantly from
hearsay, mass-media and oral, literary and image-based narratives [3] [9].
In summary, folk-theories about social intelligence enable and constrain the
everyday social world of humans.

3. Implications for AI Research
If users actively attribute intelligence on the basis of their folk-theories about
intelligence, how will this affect they way in which SIA research is conducted?
First, in order to design apparently intelligent systems, SIA researchers need
not study scientific theories about the mechanisms of ’real’ intelligence, agency
and intentionality, but rather how users think social intelligence works. This
implies taking more inspiration from the fields of anthropology, ethnology,
social psychology, cultural studies and communication studies. These disci-
plines describe the ways in which people, cultures and humanity as a whole use
folk-theoretical assumptions to construct their experience of reality. Of course,
sometimes objectivist and constructivist views can and need to be successfully
merged, e.g., when studies of folk-theories are lacking. In these cases, SIA re-
searchers may get inspiration from ’objectivist’ theories in so far as these often
are based on folk-theories [12, p. 337ff]. In general we believe both approaches
have their merits giving them reason to peacefully co-exist.
Second, once the structure of folk-theories has been described, SIA research
does not have to model levels that fall outside of this structure. For instance,
albeit the activity of neurons is for sure an enabler for intelligence in humans,
this level of description does not belong to people’s everyday understanding
of other intelligent creatures (except in quite specific circumstances). Hence,