The role of social identity, rationality and anticipation in believable agents

Agents that interact in complex social situations need to take the social context in consideration in order to perform believably. We argue that social identity is an important factor; therefore, agents should incorporate social identity theory in their behaviour, which implies the ability to categorize others (and themselves) into social groups. In addition, social situations often present social dilemmas with expected rational choices. Social identity may influence the agent to deviate from the rational choice. However, in some situations the rational choice may be the expected, and believable, behaviour. In fact, we argue that finding the dynamics between the social bias induced by social identity and the rational motivation is one of the challenges of building believable agents. In all this, anticipation takes an important role, as it is important to understand the others to cope well with a social situation.