Cognitive Social Learners: An Architecture for Modeling Normative Behavior

In many cases, creating long-term solutions to sustainability issues requires not only innovative technology, but also largescale public adoption of the proposed solutions. Social simulations are a valuable but underutilized tool that can help public policy researchers understand when sustainable practices are likely to make the delicate transition from being an individual choice to becoming a social norm. In this paper, we introduce a new normative multi-agent architecture, Cognitive Social Learners (CSL), that models bottom-up norm emergence through a social learning mechanism, while using BDI (Belief/Desire/Intention) reasoning to handle adoption and compliance. CSL preserves a greater sense of cognitive realism than influence propagation or infectious transmission approaches, enabling the modeling of complex beliefs and contradictory objectives within an agent-based simulation. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of CSL for modeling norm emergence of recycling practices and pub...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Rahmatollah Beheshti, Awrad Mohammed Ali, Gita Reese Sukthankar
• Keywords: AAAI 2015, Intelligent Agents