Management of the Political Enterprise in the Service of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Cosmopolitan Society

This chapter proposes to analyze the theory of the political enterprise with focus on the concept of ethical values-driven management in the contemporary debate on the politization of business in service of sustainability in cosmopolitan society. By service of cosmopolitan society of the political enterprise the chapter investigates the idea of the political enterprise as being a responsible political, ethical, and social agent with focus on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are required to justify its mission and role in society as a political actor that makes a different for its social and political community. The company is embedded in a social and political order with a diversity of political values, and the discussion about the meaning of the concept of values-driven management is therefore fundamental if one is to analyze the concept of the political enterprise in service of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Expressing Personality Through Non-verbal Behaviour in Real-Time Interaction

The attribution of traits plays an important role as a heuristic for how we interact with others. Many psychological models of personality are analytical in that they derive a classification from reported or hypothesised behaviour. In the work presented here, we follow the opposite approach: Our personality model generates behaviour that leads an observer to attribute personality characteristics to the actor. Concretely, the model controls all relevant aspects of non-verbal behaviour such as gaze, facial expression, gesture, and posture. The model, embodied in a virtual human, affords to realistically interact with participants in real-time. Conceptually, our model focuses on the two dimensions of extra/introversion and stability/neuroticism. In the model, personality parameters influence both, the internal affective state as well as the characteristic of the behaviour execution. Importantly, the parameters of the model are based on empirical findings in the behavioural sciences. To evaluate our model, we conducted two types of studies. Firstly, passive experiments where participants rated videos showing variants of behaviour driven by different personality parameter configurations. Secondly, presential experiments where participants interacted with the virtual human, playing rounds of the Rock-Paper-Scissors game. Our results show that the model is effective in conveying the impression of the personality of a virtual character to users. Embodying the model in an artificial social agent capable of real-time interactive behaviour is the only way to move from an analytical to a generative approach to understanding personality, and we believe that this methodology raises a host of novel research questions in the field of personality theory.

The Intentional Selection Assumption

There exists a rich literature describing how social context influences decision making. Here, we propose a novel framing of social influences, the Intentional Selection Assumption. This framework proposes that, when a person is presented with a set of options by another social agent, people may treat the set of options as intentionally selected, reflecting the chooser's inferences about the presenter and the presenter's goals. To describe our proposal, we draw analogies to the cognition literature on sampling inferences within concept learning. This is done to highlight how the Intentional Selection Assumption accounts for both normative (e.g., comparing perceived utilities) and subjective (e.g., consideration of context relevance) principles in decision making, while also highlighting how analogous findings in the concept learning literature can aid in bridging these principles by drawing attention to the importance of potential sampling assumptions within decision making paradigms. We present the two behavioral experiments that provide support to this proposal and find that social-contextual cues influence choice behavior with respect to the induction of sampling assumptions. We then discuss a theoretical framework of the Intentional Selection Assumption alongside the possibility of its potential relationships to contemporary models of choice. Overall, our results emphasize the flexibility of decision makers with respect to social-contextual factors without sacrificing systematicity regarding the preference for specific options with a higher value or utility.

Symbolic Power for Beginners: The Very First Social Efforts to Control Others’ Actions and Perceptions

Becoming a social agent requires the ability to gain some power over others’ actions and perceptions. For that purpose, symbolic practices and language matter, especially when physical means of control are unavailable, ineffective, or illegitimate. Based on an in-depth ethnographic study, I analyze such a process of symbolic empowerment from the viewpoint of very young practitioners: children age 2 to 3 years. I explore the symbolic means through which toddlers seek control over adults, from simple signals, naming, and politeness to basic fictionalization. Children’s social backgrounds, not just age and development, inform their tendency to affect adults through words. The content of symbolic practices is determined by preexisting social hierarchies between persons, groups, and institutions. In fact, the crucial challenge for young children is to take advantage of these hierarchies by publicly putting them in line with their own emerging interests.

Social Robots as Creativity Eliciting Agents

Can robots help children be more creative? In this work, we posit social robots as creativity support tools for children in collaborative interactions. Children learn creative expressions and behaviors through social interactions with others during playful and collaborative tasks, and socially emulate their peers’ and teachers’ creativity. Social robots have a unique ability to engage in social and emotional interactions with children that can be leveraged to foster creative expression. We focus on two types of social interactions: creativity demonstration, where the robot exhibits creative behaviors, and creativity scaffolding, where the robot poses challenges, suggests ideas, provides positive reinforcement, and asks questions to scaffold children’s creativity. We situate our research in three playful and collaborative tasks - the Droodle Creativity game (that affords verbal creativity), the MagicDraw game (that affords figural creativity), and the WeDo construction task (that affords constructional creativity), that children play with Jibo, a social robot. To evaluate the efficacy of the robot’s social behaviors in enhancing creative behavior and expression in children, we ran three randomized controlled trials with 169 children in the 5–10 yr old age group. In the first two tasks, the robot exhibited creativity demonstration behaviors. We found that children who interacted with the robot exhibiting high verbal creativity in the Droodle game and high figural creativity in the MagicDraw game also exhibited significantly higher creativity than a control group of participants who interacted with a robot that did not express creativity (p < 0.05*). In the WeDo construction task, children who interacted with the robot that expressed creative scaffolding behaviors (asking reflective questions, generating ideas and challenges, and providing positive reinforcement) demonstrated higher creativity than participants in the control group by expressing a greater number of ideas, more original ideas, and more varied use of available materials (p < 0.05*). We found that both creativity demonstration and creativity scaffolding can be leveraged as social mechanisms for eliciting creativity in children using a social robot. From our findings, we suggest design guidelines for pedagogical tools and social agent interactions to better support children’s creativity.

A Principle-based Analysis of Abstract Agent Argumentation Semantics

agent argumentation frameworks extend Dung’s theory with agents, and in this paper we study four types of semantics for them. First, agent defense semantics replaces Dung’s notion of defense by some kind of agent defense. Second, social agent semantics prefers arguments that belong to more agents. Third, agent reduction semantics considers the perspective of individual agents. Fourth, agent filtering semantics are inspired by a lack of knowledge. We study five existing principles and we introduce twelve new ones. In total, we provide a full analysis of fifty-two agent semantics and the seventeen principles.

A Theory of Social Agency for Human-Robot Interaction

Motivated by inconsistent, underspecified, or otherwise problematic theories and usages of social agency in the HRI literature, and leveraging philosophical work on moral agency, we present a theory of social agency wherein a social agent (a thing with social agency) is any agent capable of social action at some level of abstraction. Like previous theorists, we conceptualize agency as determined by the criteria of interactivity, autonomy, and adaptability. We use the concept of face from politeness theory to define social action as any action that threatens or affirms the face of a social patient. With these definitions in mind, we specify and examine the levels of abstraction most relevant to HRI research, compare notions of social agency and the surrounding concepts at each, and suggest new conventions for discussing social agency in our field.