Intentional Agents Research Articles

Virtue Ethics in Social Theory

AbstractTommie Shelby has offered an influential, carefully stated, and well-argued set of objections to any volitional analysis of racism (VAR) as consisting centrally in certain forms of race-based disregard. Here I hope to defend aspects of VAR by analyzing, evaluating, and sometimes countering several of his major contentions, which have stood unchallenged in the literature over more than two decades. First, I sketch and respond to his Methodological objection to VAR, which criticizes VAR's reliance on language and linguistic intuitions; then to a Psychological objection, which suggests that VAR implausibly distances an agent's intentions from her beliefs; and, finally, to a Psychopathological objection, which holds that VAR requires treating as unproblematic some psychological states better seen as aberrant. The following section treats three subtle counterexamples Shelby uses to challenge VAR's core contentions about what's necessary and what's sufficient for racism. I close with some gestures toward what I see as a promising approach, very different from his, to studying these topics.

Spatial perspective and identity in visual awareness of the bodily self-other distinction

Spatial perspective and identity of visual bodily stimuli are two key cues for the self-other distinction. However, how they emerge into visual awareness is largely unknown. Here, self- or other-hands presented in first- or third-person perspective were compared in a breaking-Continuous Flash Suppression paradigm (Experiment 1) measuring the time the stimuli need to access visual awareness, and in a Binocular Rivalry paradigm (Experiment 2), measuring predominance in perceptual awareness. Results showed that, irrespectively of identity, first-person perspective speeded up the access, whereas the third-person one increased the dominance. We suggest that the effect of first-person perspective represents an unconscious prioritization of an egocentric body coding important for visuomotor control. On the other hand, the effect of third-person perspective indicates a conscious advantage of an allocentric body representation fundamental for detecting the presence of another intentional agent. Summarizing, the emergence of self-other distinction into visual awareness would strongly depend on the interplay between spatial perspectives, with an inverse prioritization before and after conscious perception. On the other hand, identity features might rely on post-perceptual processes.

Quantitative modelling and analysis of BDI agents

Belief–desire–intention (BDI) agents are a popular agent architecture. We extend conceptual agent notation (Can)—a BDI programming language with advanced features such as failure recovery and declarative goals—to include probabilistic action outcomes, e.g. to reflect failed actuators, and probabilistic policies, e.g. for probabilistic plan and intention selection. The extension is encoded in Milner’s bigraphs. Through application of our BigraphER tool and the PRISM model checker, the probability of success (intention completion) under different probabilistic outcomes and plan/event/intention selection strategies can be investigated and compared. We present a smart manufacturing use case. A significant result is that plan selection has limited effect compared with intention selection. We also see that the impact of action failures can be marginal—even when failure probabilities are large—due to the agent making smarter choices.

Bound to Share or Not to Care. The Force of Fate, Gods, Luck, Chance and Choice across Cultures

Abstract People across cultures consider everyday choices in the context of perceived various external life-determining forces: such as fate and gods (two teleological forces) and such notions as luck and chance (two non-teleological forces). There is little cross-cultural evidence (except for a belief in gods) showing how people relate these salient notions of life-determining forces to prosociality and a sense of well-being. The current paper provides preliminary cross-cultural data to address this gap. Results indicate that choice is the most important life-determining factor. Regression analyses indicate that choice and belief in gods and fate emerged as significant predictors of prosociality towards strangers. Moreover, luck was a significant predictor of decreased prosociality. A relation between life-determining forces and life satisfaction followed the same pattern: choice, gods, and fate emerged as significant predictors of greater life satisfaction, whereas luck was associated with decreased life satisfaction. The overall pattern of results indicates that participants across different cultures might sense being bounded to share or not to care depending on the perceived intentional agency and meaning in the external forces.

Understanding Social Robots: Attribution of Intentional Agency to Artificial and Biological Bodies.

Much research in robotic artificial intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life has focused on autonomous agents as an embodied and situated approach to AI. Such systems are commonly viewed as overcoming many of the philosophical problems associated with traditional computationalist AI and cognitive science, such as the grounding problem (Harnad) or the lack of intentionality (Searle), because they have the physical and sensorimotor grounding that traditional AI was argued to lack. Robot lawn mowers and self-driving cars, for example, more or less reliably avoid obstacles, approach charging stations, and so on-and therefore might be considered to have some form of artificial intentionality or intentional directedness. It should be noted, though, that the fact that robots share physical environments with people does not necessarily mean that they are situated in the same perceptual and social world as humans. For people encountering socially interactive systems, such as social robots or automated vehicles, this poses the nontrivial challenge to interpret them as intentional agents to understand and anticipate their behavior but also to keep in mind that the intentionality of artificial bodies is fundamentally different from their natural counterparts. This requires, on one hand, a "suspension of disbelief " but, on the other hand, also a capacity for the "suspension of belief." This dual nature of (attributed) artificial intentionality has been addressed only rather superficially in embodied AI and social robotics research. It is therefore argued that Bourgine and Varela's notion of Artificial Life as the practice of autonomous systems needs to be complemented with a practice of socially interactive autonomous systems, guided by a better understanding of the differences between artificial and biological bodies and their implications in the context of social interactions between people and technology.

Development: nurturing and destroying a child

Developmental achievements during the first five years of life are described. From birth children are readily able to engage with and respond to their caregivers, whose attunement is crucial to their welfare. The child learns to differentiate objects and people and develops schemata of relating to others. Spatial exploration and the ability to categorise facilitate the attainment of object and other permanence at around eighteen months of age. At this time children begin to understand that others are intentional agents with internal states that are the sources of attitudes and actions. The child’s identification with others is salient to the formation of identity and the ability to differentiate from others. Play is vital to understanding the nature of symbols. When attachment is secure requisite transitional space is provided and mentalization is achieved. However, a grasp of beliefs and of the difference between appearance and reality is not yet achieved. Attachment characterised by misattunement and/or overt abuse may result in pathological dissociation resulting in developmental deficits that are most extreme in dissociative identity disorder.

The act of understanding uncertainty is consciousness

We define precognitive affect, composed of information holding dispositional states, as noncontextual, rudimentary building blocks of subjective intentionality. We take on a psychodynamic approach to intentional agency. Intentions unfold into actions in animate thermodynamics reducing subjective uncertainty by negentropic action. They are intentions in action carrying meaning in species having complex protein interactions with various regulated gene sets. In particular, the unfolding of intentionality in terms of biological purpose introduced by subjective functioning allows for a satisfactory account of subjective intentionality. The underlying experience of acting paves the way for understanding meaning of precognitive affect from subjective functioning. Therefore, the brain’s subjective intentionality as the underlying experience of acting is embedded in a negentropic “consciousness code” of “hidden” thermodynamic energy. It is the negentropically-derived quantum potential energy in the unified functioning of brain consciousness at the macroscopic scale. While at the mesoscopic scale, Schrödinger processes create boundary conditions for negentropic action to inform the intentional agency.

Autonomous agency, we‐agency, and social oppression

AbstractTheories of collective intentionality and theories of relational autonomy share a common interest in analyzing the social dynamics of agency. However, whereas theories of collective intentionality conceive of social groups primarily as intentional and voluntarily willed, theories of relational autonomy claim that autonomous agency is both scaffolded and constrained by social forces and structures, including the constraints imposed by nonvoluntary group membership. The question raised by this difference in view is whether social theorizing that overlooks the effects of nonvoluntary social group membership on individual and joint agency overlooks crucial aspects of the social dynamics of agency. To explore this question, this article first evaluates Michael Bratman's planning analysis of individual agency from the perspective of relational autonomy theory and compares it with a narrative self‐constitution account of temporally extended agency. It then evaluates Bratman's analysis of shared agency and discusses Shaun Gallagher and Deborah Tollefsen's concept of we‐narratives, which extends the notion of narrative construction to shared agency. Overall, the argument aims to show that if we are interested in understanding the social dynamics of agency, it is critical to attend to the way that agents exercise their intentional agency in relation to internalized and external social constraints.

Bad Wolves? Political Ecology of Responsibility and More-Than-Human Perspectives in Human–Wildlife Interactions

Given the widespread failure of anthropocentric approaches to wildlife conservation, questions of conviviality have become increasingly important for conservation efforts. We propose that political-ecological conceptualizations of other-than-human perspectives offer promising avenues for fostering more just and sustainable human-wildlife interactions. To explore these issues, we investigate wolf conservation in northeastern Finland, focusing on the contested coexistence of humans and wolves. Our study draws on data obtained through interviews and participant observation with local residents, interviews with wolf behavior researchers, and analysis of policy documents. Our findings highlight the fundamental roles of power and responsibility in human-wildlife coexistence, as well as the importance of attending to wolves’ intrinsic patterns of behavior. We argue for the value of distinguishing between human agency and other-than-human actions, as attributing intentional agency to wolves can obscure important aspects of human responsibility, political decision-making, and power dynamics at the intersections of humans and other-than-humans.

Introducing a four-fold way to conceptualize artificial agency

Recent developments in AI-research suggest that an AI-driven science might not be that far off. The research of for Melnikov et al. (2018) and that of Evans et al. (2018) show that automated systems can already have a distinctive role in the design of experiments and in directing future research. Common practice in many of the papers devoted to the automation of basic research is to refer to these automated systems as ‘agents’. What is this attribution of agency based on and to what extent is this an important notion in the broader context of an AI-driven science? In an attempt to answer these questions, this paper proposes a new methodological framework, introduced as the Four-Fold Framework, that can be used to conceptualize artificial agency in basic research. It consists of four modeling strategies, three of which were already identified and used by Sarkia (2021) to conceptualize ‘intentional agency’. The novelty of the framework is the inclusion of a fourth strategy, introduced as conceptual modeling, that adds a semantic dimension to the overall conceptualization. The strategy connects to the other strategies by modeling both the actual use of ‘artificial agency’ in basic research as well as what is meant by it in each of the other three strategies. This enables researchers to bridge the gap between theory and practice by comparing the meaning of artificial agency in both an academic as well as in a practical context.

Moral luck and the roles of outcome and negligence in moral judgments

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences of outcome and negligence on moral judgments of accidental actions, and hence their roles in the explanation of moral luck. In Experiment 1 (N = 300), two previous studies were replicated in which an agent armed with either a bat or a gun (to manipulate negligence) unintentionally killed a suspected intruder who turned out, luckily, to be a burglar, or unluckily, a family friend (to manipulate outcome). In response to an online questionnaire, participants made moral judgments of punishment, blame and wrongness and rated the agent's negligence and intentionality. The effects of both outcome (victim) and negligence (weapon type) IVs were slight, whereas perceived negligence had a substantial impact on all three judgments. In Experiment 2 (N = 241) the potential influence of both outcome and negligence was raised by increasing the contrasts between conditions: the agent was armed or unarmed, and the suspected intruder was harmed or unharmed. Perceived negligence again had a substantial impact on all three judgments, but now outcome, too, had a strong and direct effect on punishment judgments. These findings indicate that outcome effects on blame and wrongness judgments of accidental agents result primarily from the differential attribution of negligence: agents are considered more negligent – and hence more culpable – when outcomes are worse. In contrast, high levels of punishment are usually assigned when, and only when, the accidental agent is considered negligent and the outcome is negative. We discuss the implications for the interpretation of previous findings of strong outcome effects, and whether these effects, and therefore moral luck, are best explained by hindsight bias or by more rational updating of moral judgments.

The role of prior exposure in the likelihood of adopting the Intentional Stance toward a humanoid robot

Abstract One of the key questions in human–robot interaction research is whether humans perceive robots as intentional agents, or rather only as mindless machines. Research has shown that, in some contexts, people do perceive robots as intentional agents. However, the role of prior exposure to robots as a factor potentially playing a role in the attribution of intentionality is still poorly understood. To this end, we asked two samples of high school students, which differed with respect to the type of education they were pursuing (scientific/technical vs. artistic) to complete the InStance Test, measuring individual tendency to attribute intentionality toward robots. Results showed that, overall, participants were more prone to attribute intentionality to robots after being exposed to a theoretical lecture about robots’ functionality and use. Moreover, participants’ scientific/technical education resulted in a higher likelihood of attribution of intentionality to robots, relative to those with artistic education. Therefore, we suggest that the type of education, as well as individually acquired knowledge, modulates the likelihood of attributing intentionality toward robots.

Can a robot lie? Young children's understanding of intentionality beneath false statements

AbstractIncluding robots in children's lives calls for reflection on the psychological and moral aspects of such relationships, especially with respect to children's ability to differentiate intentional from unintentional false statements, that is, lies from mistakes. This ability calls for an understanding of an interlocutor's intentions. This study examined the ability of 5‐6‐year‐olds to recognize, and morally evaluate, lies and mistakes produced by a human as compared to a NAO robot, and to attribute relevant emotions to the deceived party. Irrespective of the agent, children had more difficulty in understanding mistakes than lies. In addition, they were disinclined to attribute a lie to the robot. Children's age and their understanding of intentionality were the strongest predictors of their performance on the lie‐mistake task. Children's Theory of Mind, but not their executive function skills, also correlated with their performance. Our findings suggest that, regardless of age, a robot is perceived as an intentional agent. Robot behaviour was more acceptable for children because his actions could be attributed to someone who programmed it to act in a specific way.Highlights The ability to recognize an intention to lie or not in different agents represents a significant developmental step. Children saw a human/robot making intentionally or unintentionally false statements, and understanding the mistake was more difficult than the lie. Robots may be associated with the human concept by younger children with important implications for use of cHRI in education.

The impact of cultural variability on brand stereotype, emotion and purchase intention

PurposeThis study aims to focus on an interplay of brand stereotypes (Brands as Intentional Agents Framework [BIAF]) with an aspect of culture and its impact on behavioral intentions in an individualist culture (Norway) and a collectivist culture (Thailand).Design/methodology/approachThis study incorporates a survey conducted in two cultures (Norway: N = 177 and Thailand: N = 288).FindingsIn both cultures, competence had a stronger effect on purchase intentions toward a brand than warmth. There was a stronger effect on brand purchase intentions of competence found for an individualist versus a collectivist culture, and we found a stronger effect of warmth on purchase intentions in a collectivist versus an individualist culture. The direct joint effect of warmth and competence on purchase intentions was brand-specific in Norway. Admiration mediated this joint effect in the collectivist but not in the individualist culture.Research limitations/implicationsThis study’s results point to cross-cultural variability of some of the effects of brand perceptions on behavioral intentions.Practical implicationsThese findings suggest that international brand managers should consider both the cultural universality and the cultural variability of BIAF.Originality/valueDespite extensive research on BIAF, studies on brand perceptions from the cross-cultural perspective are few. This investigation sheds some light on the differential effects of the framework across a collectivist and an individualist culture.

Karl Barth's Theology of God as the Absolute Person: Decision and the Problem of the Counterfactuals

AbstractThis article argues that the tension identified by maximalist interpreters in Barth's theology between his concrete identification of Jesus Christ with the essence of God and affirmation of counterfactual possibilities is motivated by Barth's theology that God is the absolute person. Barth's theology of divine personhood includes an element of self‐mastery over Godself. It is demonstrated that Barth uses the concept of decision and counterfactual claims to secure God's Lordship over Godself and avoid any necessity of compulsion in God's actions. God is the absolute person, a self‐determining and self‐motivated intentional agent, which Barth utilises to secure God's irreducible, full presence in God's gracious turning towards us in revelation and reconciliation.

Negotiated harms in moralized policies: The case of Duterte’s war on drugs

Viewing a policy as harmful can lead to its moral condemnation. However, this harmfulness can be constructed and negotiated to lead to different moral positions by building upon available, accessible, and relevant discourses. This study examined how individuals constructed and negotiated harm in moral reasoning about a contentious policy, Philippine President Duterte’s war on drugs, locally known as tokhang. We conducted thematic analysis with attention to discourse to analyze interviews with 12 Filipino young adults, using the Theory of Dyadic Morality as a starting point to make sense of constructions of harm. Reasoning about tokhang showed different constructions of intentional agents and vulnerable victims serving as the basis for moral positions. Moral condemnation of the war on drugs emphasized the vulnerability of its victims and the intentionality of the government and police as agents. On the other hand, moral justification of the policy constructed drug war victims as agentic and guilty of crimes, the police as potentially vulnerable victims acting according to protocol to defend themselves, and rogue agents acting independently of the policy. Ambiguous positions were also made possible when the causality of harm is unclear. These constructions and negotiations were built upon broader discourses deployed in the sociopolitical context of urban young adults, with individual contexts and characteristics contributing to variations in the accessibility and relevance of certain discourses and resulting moral positions.

Application of the stereotype content model in marketing: a three-level review and future research

PurposeThe aim of this research is to examine the application of the stereotype content model (SCM) in the field of marketing from macro (the country of origin), meso- (corporate image) and micro (service providers, brands, advertising and promotions) levels.Design/methodology/approachThis paper collects, reviews and summarizes the relevant literature, and prospects future research directions from three levels on this research topic.FindingsFirst, the authors contend that competence primacy popularizes in the early work but warmth becomes more influential recently. Second, they identify and discuss two doubts of the SCM in marketing, namely the moral dimension and the link between brands as intentional agents framework (BIAF) and the brand personality theory. Finally, they suggest several research avenues for the use of SCM in marketing research, including research on nation branding, emerging global brands and Confucianist cultures at macro level, artificial intelligence and warmth-as-competence strategy at meso-level, and brand personality and the brand animal logo at micro level.Originality/valueAs an established framework in social psychology, the SCM has been increasingly applied in marketing research and a literature review in this light appears timely. This paper conducts for the first time a comprehensive review of the SCM in the marketing field on three levels, projects promising research directions, and thus contributes to the academia of marketing.

Spontaneous attribution of underspecified belief of social partners facilitates processing shared information

The main question of Theory of Mind research is not only how we represent others’ mental states, but also how these representations influence our first-person interaction with our surrounding environment. A novel theory of belief files proposes that we should think about belief tracking as an online, spontaneous, and effortless mechanism giving rise to structured representations, thus easing the use of beliefs in behavior selection. Beliefs are formed by two different sub mechanisms: (1) opening an empty placeholder belief file, for a particular intentional agent, and (2) filling it up with mental content attributed to the agent. This theory opens the possibility of exploiting theory of mind abilities even in situations when we can attribute only underspecified mental contents to others. The goal of the present study was to provide a proof of concept test: whether spontaneous belief tracking starts effortlessly even when we do not know a partner’s actual belief content. We created an object detection paradigm, where the visual access of a virtual agent to the object to be detected by the participant was manipulated. The agent getting access to the information for processing always preceded the participant getting access to it, resulting in the need of attributing belief without specified content in it. Our results have shown that participants detected the object with a reduced reaction time when the observed agent had visual access to the object’s expected place compared to when the participant watched the same scenario, but the object’s location remained occluded for the observed agent and thus was revealed only for the participant. This suggests that the information processing of humans speeds up when another agent has access to a piece of information as well. Thus, we do track agents’ potential beliefs without knowing its actual content. This study contributes to our understanding of the effect of spontaneous computation of others’ mental states on first-person information processing.

Intent-Based Moral Judgment in Old Age.

Recent studies support the idea of an intent-to-outcome shift in moral judgments with age. We further assessed whether a reduced reliance on intentions is associated with aging in a preregistered study with 73 younger (20-41years) and 79 older (70-84years) adults, group-matched on education level. Participants were presented with a set of moral cases to evaluate, created by varying orthogonally the valence (neutral, negative) of the information regarding the agent's intentions and the action's outcomes. The two age groups did not differ in the extent they relied on intentions in moral judgment. These results suggest that an intent-to-outcome shift might not be found in all aging populations, challenging prevailing theories suggesting that aging is necessarily associated with a reduced reliance on intentions.

Professional identity formation: linking meaning to well-being.

Trainee distress and burnout continue to be serious concerns for educational programs in medicine, prompting the implementation of numerous interventions. Although an expansive body of literature suggests that the experience of meaning at work is critical to professional wellbeing, relatively little attention has been paid to how this might be leveraged in the educational milieu. We propose that professional identity formation (PIF), the process by which trainees come to not only attain competence, but additionally to “think, act and feel” like physicians, affords us a unique opportunity to ground trainees in the meaningfulness of their work. Using the widely accepted tri-partite model of meaning, we outline how this process can contribute to wellbeing. We suggest strategies to optimize the influence of PIF on wellbeing, offering curricular suggestions, as well as ideas regarding the respective roles of communities of practice, teachers, and formative educational experiences. Collectively, these encourage trainees to act as intentional agents in the making of their novel professional selves, anchoring them to the meaningfulness of their work, and supporting their short and long-term wellbeing.