Page 52 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Modeling Social Relationship 35

second agent’s behavior will cause a similar failure and replanning activity in
the first agent.
In the case of grooming, during orientation and approach, the groomee agent
can move and also change posture, and the groomer will simply adjust, unless
the groomee moves clearly away from the groomer, in which case the approach
behavior will fail. When the groomer arrives at prelude distance, it expects the
groomee to be not moving and to be looking at him, otherwise the prelude phase
will not be activated. Then, if the groomee make a positive prelude response,
the groomer can initiate the grooming phase.
Agents enter into, and terminate or modify, joint action voluntarily, each
motivated by its own perceptions and goals.

6. Coparticipation and Engagement

Our notion of social plan has some subtlety and indirectness, which is really
necessitated by the distributed nature of agent interaction. There is no agreed
shared plan as such, each participant has their own social plan, which includes
expectations of the actions of coparticipants. Each participant attempts to find
andtocarryouttheir“best”social planwhichsatisfiestheirgoals. Inconstrained
situations, it may be that the best social plan of each participant is very similar
to the best social plans of coparticipants. Thus social plans of individuals may
be more or less engaged. Engagement concens the agreement and coherence
among the instantiations of the social plans of the participants.
A standard example is the prostitute and the client, which coparticipate and
cooperate, each with his or her own goals and social plan. Thus, for social
action, the prostitute needs to sufficiently match the client’s social plan and
model of prostitute appearance and behavior, and the client needs to behave
sufficiently like the prostitute’s idea of a client.
Adversarial coparticipation occurs with lawyers representing defendent and
plaintiff. Since however there is always a residual conflict or disparity and
residual shared benefits in all relationships, it is difficult to find cases of pure
cooperation or even pure adversality.
The initiation (and termination) of joint action usually involves less engage-
ment between the social plans of coparticipants. The grooming preludes ob-
servedinsocial monkeys are for example initially more unilateral. Initiationand
termination usually involve protocols by which coparticipants navigate paths
through a space of states of different degrees of engagement.
In this model, social interaction is never unilateral. First, some “other”
is always an imagined coparticipant. Second, even in the case of hardwired
evolved behaviors, the behavior is intended for, only works with, and only
makes sense with, a coparticipant, even though, in this case, there is no explicit
representation of the other. It is not clear for example what representation, if