Social Attitudes: Investigations with Agent Simulations Using Webots

This article presents a multiagent simulation environment for studying agents' socio-political attitudes, a high-level theoretical and conceptual model proposed by Petric et al (2002) that was intended for conversational agents, and proposes future extensions of the model.

Abstract

Received: 9-Jan-2003 Accepted: 8-Jul-2003 Published: 31-Oct-2003 This article presents a multiagent simulation environment for studying agents ' socio-political attitudes. It departs from a previously proposed concept of agents with socio-political attitudes, a high-level theoretical and conceptual model proposed by Petric et al. (2002) that was intended for conversational agents. In contrast, our work pursues a bottom-up simulation philosophy where attitudes are grounded in sensory-motor behaviour of spatially distributed autonomous agents, modelled in Webots simulation software. The original model was extended by defining an agent's socio-political type by means of weighting the three components found in the Petric et al. (2002) model (neo-liberal, alternative and fundamentalist), thus allowing the creation of mixed socio-political types. Also, in the simulations performed, issues were modelled as agents with variable levels of importance. Moreover, we introduced inter-agent communication capable of causing changes in socio-political types. Results are presented and discussed with respect to the initial research questions. According to