Do Habits Fade Out? Discerning Between Two Theories Using Agent-Based Simulation

Inducing behavioural change requires a good understanding of how habits break. We identified two theories in the psychological literature on this process: the decrease theory and persist theory. Both theories are used to explain behavioural change, but one states the original habit fades out, while the other theory states the habit persists. We...

Towards Agent-Based Models of Rumours in Organizations: A Social Practice Theory Approach

Rumour is a collective emergent phenomenon with a potential for provoking a crisis. Modelling approaches have been deployed since five decades ago; however, the focus was mostly on epidemic behaviour of the rumours which does not take into account the differences between agents. We use social practice theory to model agent decision-making in...

Improving Confidence in the Estimation of Values and Norms

Autonomous agents (AA) will increasingly be interacting with us in our daily lives. While we want the benefits attached to AAs, it is essential that their behavior is aligned with our values and norms. Hence, an AA will need to estimate the values and norms of the humans it interacts with, which is not a straightforward task when solely...

When do rule changes count-as legal rule changes?

Institutions regulate societies. Comprising Searle's constitutive counts-as rules, "A counts-as B in context C", an institution ascribes from brute and institutional facts (As), a social reality comprising institutional facts (Bs) conditional on the social reality (contexts Cs). When brute facts change an institution evolves from one social...

Situational Deliberation: Getting to Social Intelligence

Socially intelligent systems exhibit, understand, and reason about social behavior, in order to support people in their daily lives. We claim that a fundamental new approach based on social concepts is needed to build these socially intelligent systems. In this paper, we explore how the concepts of social practices and social identities can be...

A qualitative evaluation of social support by an empathic agent (abstract)

This paper presents a qualitative study of the supportive behavior of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that provides social support to cyberbullying victims. The results indicate that social support is conveyed. In addition, we demonstrate a method that can be utilized to evaluate embodied agents for vulnerable target audiences (e.g.,...

A Qualitative Evaluation of Social Support by an Empathic Agent (abstract)

This paper presents a qualitative study of the supportive behavior of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that provides social support to cyberbullying victims. The results indicate that social support is conveyed. In addition, we demonstrate a method that can be utilized to evaluate embodied agents for vulnerable target audiences (e.g.,...

A Conversation Model Enabling Intelligent Agents to Give Emotional Support

In everyday life, people frequently talk to others to help them deal with negative emotions. To some extent, everybody is capable of comforting other people, but so far conversational agents are unable to deal with this type of situation. To provide intelligent agents with the capability to give emotional support, we propose a domain-independent...

A Conversational Agent for Social Support: Validation of Supportive Dialogue Sequences

Recently, we proposed a dialogue model for social support. To validate this model, we analyzed 23 real world chat conversations. After some adjustments, the dialogue sequence patterns specified in the model cover 87.4% of the data. Based on this result, we conclude that the dialogue model accurately describes comforting conversations. Next, the...

Corpus-based Validation of a Dialogue Model for Social Support

Recent developments in affective computing show that Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are increasingly capable of complex social and emotional dialogues. Our research concerns the design and evaluation of an ECA that provides social support to children that are being bullied though the Internet. Recently, we proposed a domain-independent...

A BDI Dialogue Agent for Social Support: Specification and Evaluation Method (extended abstract)

An important task for empathic agents is to provide social support, that is, to help alleviate emotional distress. In this paper we specify verbal support types for a dialogue agent that provides social support, and propose an evaluation method for such an agent in a sensitive domain (cyberbullying) with a vulnerable target audience (children).

A BDI Dialogue Agent for Social Support: Specification and Evaluation Method

An important task for empathic agents is to provide social support, that is, to help people increase their well-being and decrease the perceived burden of their problems. The contributions of this paper are 1) the specifcation of speech acts for a social support dialogue agent, and 2) an evaluation method for this agent. The dialogue agent...

Simulating Peer Support for Victims of Cyberbullying

This paper proposes a design for an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that empowers victims of cyberbullying by simulating peer support. The anti-cyberbullying buddy helps a child to cope with negative emotions due to a cyberbullying incident and it shows the child how to deal with future incidents of cyberbullying. The buddy interacts with...