Socially conscious decision-making

Abstract

For individually motivated agents to work collaboratively to satisfy shared goals, they must be able to make decisions about actions and intentions in the context of commitments to group activities. This paper examines the role of social consciousness in the process of reconciliation of intentions to do group-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. We define a measure of social consciousness; describe its incorporation into the SPIRE experimental system, a simulation environment that allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied; and present results of several experiments that investigate the interaction in decision-making of measures of group and individual good. In particular, we investigate the effect of varying levels of social consciousness on the utility of the group and the individuals it comprises. A key finding is that an intermediate level of social consciousness yields better results than an extreme commitment. We suggest preliminary principles for designers of collaborative agents based on the results.