The Importance of Cognition and Affect for Artificially Intelligent Decision Makers

Agency - the capacity to plan and act - and experience - the capacity to sense and feel - are two critical aspects that determine whether people will perceive non-human entities, such as autonomous agents, to have a mind. There is evidence that the absence of either can reduce cooperation. We present an experiment that tests the necessity of both for cooperation with agents. In this experiment we manipulated people's perceptions about the cognitive and affective abilities of agents, when engaging in the ultimatum game. The results indicated that people offered more money to agents that were perceived to make decisions according to their intentions (high agency), rather than randomly (low agency). Additionally, the results showed that people offered more money to agents that expressed emotion (high experience), when compared to agents that did not (low experience). We discuss the implications of this agency-experience theoretical framework for the design of artificially intelligent decision makers.

[1]  Ross Buck,et al.  Emotional Expressivity and Trustworthiness: The Role of Nonverbal Behavior in the Evolution of Cooperation , 2003 .

[2]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game , 2003, Science.

[3]  Jonathan Gratch,et al.  The Impact of Emotion Displays in Embodied Agents on Emergence of Cooperation with People , 2011, PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.

[4]  F. Heider,et al.  An experimental study of apparent behavior , 1944 .

[5]  I. Blanchette,et al.  The influence of affect on higher level cognition: A review of research on interpretation, judgement, decision making and reasoning , 2010 .

[6]  W. Güth,et al.  An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining , 1982 .

[7]  F. Binkofski,et al.  Can Machines Think? Interaction and Perspective Taking with Robots Investigated via fMRI , 2008, PloS one.

[8]  N. Haslam.  Dehumanization: An Integrative Review , 2006, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[9]  G. Glass,et al.  Consequences of Failure to Meet Assumptions Underlying the Fixed Effects Analyses of Variance and Covariance , 1972 .

[10]  D. Wegner,et al.  Dimensions of Mind Perception , 2007, Science.

[11]  Bo An,et al.  An Overview of Recent Application Trends at the AAMAS Conference: Security, Sustainability and Safety , 2012, AI Mag..

[12]  E. Vesterinen,et al.  Affective Computing , 2009, Encyclopedia of Biometrics.

[13]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. , 2007, Psychological review.

[14]  Jonathan Gratch,et al.  The Effect of Agency on the Impact of Emotion Expressions on People's Decision Making , 2013, 2013 Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction.

[15]  Jonathan Gratch,et al.  The effect of expression of anger and happiness in computer agents on negotiations with humans , 2011, AAMAS.

[16]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  Creating Interactive Virtual Humans: Some Assembly Required , 2002, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[17]  O. J. Harvey,et al.  Intergroup Conflict And Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment , 2013 .

[18]  K. Scherer,et al.  Handbook of affective sciences. , 2003 .

[19]  Robert H. Frank,et al.  Feelings and Emotions: Introducing Moral Emotions into Models of Rational Choice , 2004 .

[20]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  The role of affect in decision making. , 2003 .

[21]  D. Wegner,et al.  Causes and consequences of mind perception , 2010, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[22]  G. Pagnoni,et al.  A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation , 2002, Neuron.

[23]  P. Petta,et al.  Computational models of emotion , 2010 .

[24]  Crystal L. Hoyt,et al.  Immersive Virtual Environment Technology as a Methodological Tool for Social Psychology , 2002 .

[25]  A. Manstead,et al.  An interpersonal approach to emotion in social decision making: the emotions as social information model , 2010 .

[26]  P. Kollock.  SOCIAL DILEMMAS: The Anatomy of Cooperation , 1998 .

[27]  Christopher D. Frith,et al.  Imaging the Intentional Stance in a Competitive Game , 2002, NeuroImage.

[28]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  Oxytocin increases trust in humans , 2005, Nature.

[29]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Toward sociable robots , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[30]  Jonathan Gratch,et al.  Reading people's minds from emotion expressions in interdependent decision making. , 2014, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[31]  N. Haslam,et al.  Animals and Androids , 2007, Psychological science.

[32]  Daniel Houser,et al.  A functional imaging study of cooperation in two-person reciprocal exchange , 2001, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[33]  A. Damasio,et al.  Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex. , 2000, Cerebral cortex.

[34]  J. Henrich.  Does culture matter in economic behavior? Ultimatum game bargaining among the machiguenga , 2000 .