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Introduction
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February 2008 - present
Position
- Course of Psychology & Economics
January 2000 - December 2008
January 1998 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (407)
This chapter about the theory of “power” and power relations, since tutelarity is a power relation and exploits the power of X over Y. Criticisms to biased views of “power” as immediately a “social” notion, as necessarily “domination”. We first base power upon the individual agentivity/goals layer: micro-foundation. We derive different kinds of “so...
In this paper, we investigate the primitives of collaboration, useful also for conflicting and neutral interactions, in a world populated by both artificial and human agents. We analyze in particular the dependence network of a set of agents. And we enrich the connections of this network with the beliefs that agents have regarding the trustworthine...
Autonomy is crucial in cooperation. The complexity of HRI scenarios requires autonomous robots able to exploit their superhuman computations (based on DNN, Machine Learning techniques and Big Data) in a trustworthy way. Trustworthiness is not only a matter of accuracy, privacy or security, but it is becoming more and more a matter of adaptation to...
Trust in vaccines and in the institutions responsible for their management is a key asset in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. By means of a structured multi-scales survey based on the socio-cognitive model of trust, this study investigates the interplay of institutional trust, confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, information habits, person...
The central focus of this research is the fast and crucial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a crucial psychological, relational, and political construct: trust. We investigate how the consequences of the pandemic, in terms of healthcare, state intervention and impositions, and daily life and habits, have affected trust in public institutions in I...
Computing systems can function as augmentation of individual humans as well as of human societies. In this contribution, we take mirror worlds as a conceptual blueprint to envision future smart environments in which the physical and the virtual layers are blended into each other. We suggest that pervasive computing technologies can be used to creat...
We suggest that meta-emotions – defined as emotions about one's own emotions – contribute to the complexity of people's psychic life by modifying the intensity and quality of their first-order emotions, and influencing their decisions and behaviour. After addressing similarities and differences between first-order and second-order emotions, and the...
The paper recaps our cognitivistic perspective on norms and behavior regulation: cognitive agent architecture and processing of beliefs and goals; mind socialization through 'adoption' of the goals of the others; the conditions for norm 'adoption'; norms cognitive processing. Then the paper focus on some crucial issues not just of norms into our mi...
The thesis of this position paper is that the use of expressions like "What Do You Mean With .......?" is actually quite rare, and that in general we do not explicitly negotiate about the meaning of our words or about the linguistic rules we follow and, about the shared meaning of objects, events, and acts. Nevertheless, a real negotiation occurs a...
We will work in this paper on the central role of "expectations" in mental life and in purposive action. We will present a Cognitive Anatomy of expectations, their reduction in terms of more elementary ingredients: beliefs and goals. We will base several predictions on this analytical decomposition and we will present a theory of hope, worry, frust...
In this chapter we discuss the revolution of digital democracy (a.k.a. on-line democracy), by arguing that it should integrate (rather than replace) representative democracy based on computational tools and platforms, and that the relationship between people and their representatives and institutions remains absolutely crucial to democracy as a bil...
The paper introduces a new perspective on abstract concepts (e.g. “freedom”) and their associate words representation, the Words As social Tools (WAT) view. Traditional theories conceptualize language as a way to index referents, a shortcut to access meaning, or a way to access meaning through words associations. WAT goes beyond these theories by i...
The mind is an anticipatory device. Its main purpose is to 'produce future', telling us not only how the world might or will be, but also how it should be, or better how we would like it to be. Expectancies shape our lives: they impact on our actual outcomes, often acting as self-fulfilling prophecies. They also constitute a reference point for est...
I claim that two important aspects of emotions are usually missed
by current computational models and uses. On the one side, human emotions
are complex and rich mental states, not simple reactive mechanisms. They
have rich cognitive ingredients, in particular “evaluations”. I will propose
some brief example of such a necessary “cognitive anatomy” (...
Although most researchers maintain that shame and guilt are distinct emotions, the debate on their differences is still open. We aim to show that some of the current distinctions between shame and guilt need to be redrawn, and their adaptive and social implications need to be revisited. We suggest the following distinguishing criteria: the kind of...
Human communication is a traditional topic of research in many disciplines such as psychology, linguistics and philosophy, all of which mainly focused on language, gestures and deictics. However, these do not constitute the sole channels of communication, especially during online social interaction, where instead an additional critical role may be...
Contempt and disgust share a number of features which distinguish them from other hostile emotions: they both present two distinct facets—a nonmoral facet and a moral one; they both imply a negative evaluation of the dispositional kind as well as disrespect towards the target of the feeling; and they trigger avoidance and exclusion action tendencie...
The widespread assumption that anger is a response to wrongdoing and motivates people to sanction it, as well as the lack of distinction between resentment and indignation, obscure notable differences among these three emotions in terms of their specific beliefs, goals, and action tendencies, their nonmoral or moral character, and the kinds of mora...
Trust and risk are inextricably intertwined in the mind of anyone who wants to pursue a goal, because one must rely on actions where the possibility of failure can be predictable. The relation between risk and trust is intrinsic: on the one hand, there cannot be any trust if there is no perceived risk, such as the uncertainty of success of those ac...
Ag-MAS community created autonomous and proactive intelligent entities (which will become ‘presences’ and ‘roles’ in our hybrid (human and artificial agents) society and mixed reality (combined virtual and ‘real’ world). Now a question will be: are we able to manage these autonomous and too informed and intelligent agents?
This work aims to account for the complexity of pride, while also trying to clear some ambiguities that in our view result from unwarranted assumptions about its two facets—“authentic” versus “hubristic” pride. We propose a model of pride in terms of its cognitive and motivational components; distinguish two kinds of pride proper: pride1, referring...
concepts (“freedom”) differ from concrete ones (“cat”), as they do not have a bounded, identifiable, and clearly perceivable referent. The way in which abstract concepts are represented has recently become a topic of intense debate, especially because of the spread of the embodied approach to cognition. Within this framework concepts derive their m...
When a goal is deemed to be unattainable, people typically try to find some feasible substitute for it. When the goal is viewed as irreplaceable as well as definitely unattainable, it is typically given up. However, some goals are perceived as irrevocable, even though they are believed to be irreplaceable and definitely unattainable. We will try to...
Our claim in this paper is that a theory of ?pretense? (in all its crucial uses in human society and cognition) can be built only if it is grounded on the general theory of ?behavioral implicit communication? (BIC), which is not to be confused with non-verbal communication (with distinct notions being frequently conflated, such as ?signs? vs. ?mess...
A theory of the Value/Utility of information and knowledge (K) is not really there. This would require a theory of the centrality of Goals in minds, and of the role of K relative to Goals and their dynamics. K value is a notion relative to Goal value. Inf/K is precisely a resource, a means and the value of means depends on the value of their possib...
We present our theory on trust and its components and dimensions, and apply it to trust in complex dynamic socio-technical systems and to their self-organising emergent results. Specifically, we apply our theory to ICT-based systems, where a “Social Order” is no longer fully “spontaneous” due to the invisible hand impinging on individual and selfis...
One issue particularly relevant in cases of risk of flooding and landslides caused by specific conditions of the weather, is the ability of citizens to take the right decisions on the basis of different information sources to which they have access.
In this paper we describe some simulative experiments showing how a population of cognitive agents t...
In this work we realized a series of social simulations in order to investigate how a set of cognitive agents behave in presence of critical hydrogeological phenomena, showing some interesting results about their choices.
The paper starts with the presentation of an ad-hoc Bayesian trust model that we created and used in the simulations. Then we de...
In this paper we pay particular attention to generalized knowledge, that is the possibility to exploit knowledge deriving from their membership to given categories or stereotypes for agents' evaluation. The cognitive advantage of this kind of knowledge can be summarized stating that it allows us to get valuable information on someone/something we d...
In this article, we are interested in the fact that relevance and trustworthiness of information acquired by an agent X from a source F strictly depends and derives from X's trust in F with respect to the kind of information. In particular, we are interested in analyzing the relevance of F's category as indicator for its trustworthiness with respec...
In this paper we want to focus our attention on the importance of categories for trust in information sources (TIS). We analyze an interactive cognitive model for searching information in a world where each agent can be considered as belonging to a specific category. We also consider some kind of variability within the canonical categorial behavior...
A new kind of smart space is emerging in which digital, physical, and social layers are strongly intertwined. These spaces extend the classic assistive functionality of ambient intelligence toward more proactive possibilities, where the smart environment not only monitors people as they perform tasks but also influences their plans and intentions....
What is the relationship between actors’ mental representations (e.g., beliefs, goals) and the conflicts between them? And what is the relation (if any) between individual/subjective conflicts (among my goals) and social conflicts? How does one build a systematic ontology of conflicts taking into account objective and subjective types, the internal...
What does it mean "feeling" something? How body activation and its perception is crucial in emotional experience? How it impact on the cognitive components of human emotions and their "appraisal" function, or is affected by them? Which are the different mental paths of emotional experiences?
I first argue against the “psycho-phobia” that has characterized the foundation of the social sciences and invalidates many social policies. I then present a basic ontology of social actions by examining their most important forms, with a special focus on pro-social actions, in particular Goal Delegation and Goal Adoption. These action types are th...
Two general claims are made in this work. First, we need several different layers of "theory," in particular for understanding human behavior. These layers should concern: the cognitive (mental) representations and mechanisms; the neural underlying processes; the evolutionary history and adaptive functions of our cognition and behaviors; the emerge...
This paper outlines an integrated approach to trust and relevance with respect to arguments: in particular, it is suggested that trust in relevance has a central role in argumentation. We first distinguish two types of argumentative relevance: internal relevance, i.e. the extent to which a premise has a bearing on its purported conclusion, and exte...
Last years have seen the raise of several contexts such as Ambient Intelligence, Augmented Reality where Artificial Intelligence is combined with other domains such as Ubiquitous Computing, Sensor Network Technologies in order to provide proactive and responsive services to users. However, these systems are most of the times ad hoc, lacking a conce...
I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and specialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the parti...
We start from the claim that trust in information sources is just a kind of social trust. We are interested in the fact that the relevance and the trustworthiness of the information acquired by an agent X from a given number of sources strictly depends and derives from the X's trust on each of these sources with respect the kind of that information...
Agent-based computer simulation is the central (revolutionary) challenge for the future of Social Sciences. The foundational issue of the Social Sciences is the micro-macro link, the relation between cognition and individual behavior and social self-organizing and complex structures. There are no approaches for understanding its (causal) mechanisms...
This analysis shows an interesting consequence of normative acts which
is usually overlooked: their power to favour the communication and
subsequent diffusion of normative requests. The belief that a behaviour is
prescribed by a large number of individuals contributes to increase its
observance and defence, thereby creating a positive dynamic that...
Beliefs and Goals have a crucial “quantitative” dimension or “value/strength”: the “doxastic value” of beliefs, and the “motivational value” of Goals. These “values” and “degrees” play a fundamental role in the cognitive processing: believing or not, preferring and choosing, suffering, expecting, trusting, feeling.
In this chapter, some different (and in part complementary) analyses and approaches to the study of the relationship between Norms and Trust are briefly introduced. First, how Trust and Norms can be considered the basis of each other is analyzed depending on the phenomenon considered. Second, starting from the fact that an agent’s trustworthiness c...
Information provided by a source should be assessed by an intelligent agent on the basis of several criteria: most notably, its content and the trust one has in its source. In turn, the observed quality of information should feed back on the assessment of its source, and such feedback should intelligently distribute among different features of the...
Per comprendere il legame tra norme sociali e azione, proponiamo un’analisi del modo in cui le norme sono rappresentate nella mente degli individui e dei meccanismi che permettono la formazione delle rappresentazioni normative. Tale modello cognitivo dell’obbedienza alle norme permette anche di riconoscere una proprieta delle azioni normative solit...
One of the most addressed kinds of relationships able to generate value in a network is trust (studied in different ways, for different purposes, by different disciplines). While it is very important to keep on investigating this issue using an interdisciplinary and integrated approach, it is also crucial to study the value-generation involved from...
The aim of this paper is to clarify what kind of normativity characterizes
a convention. First, we argue that conventions have normative consequences because
they always involve a form of trust and reliance.We contend that it is by reference to a
moral principle impinging on these aspects (i.e. the principle of Reliability) that interpersonal
oblig...
Research interest in social networks area can be explained mainly because this type of network: (i) promotes the interpersonal relationship; (ii) has a natural tendency for knowledge emergence; (iii) generates large volumes of information. This interest is reinforced due to the fact that since the 90's Web Social Networks, e.g. Facebook or Orkut, h...
Sometimes in the literature of Social Simulation it seems that the problem is just to provide new (kind of) data to the social sciences and policies, and that, in order to do so, one has to refer to classical cognitive or social theories, implement them, and run some experiment. In my view, this is a reductive and subordinated attitude, which in th...
Recent developments within Ambient Intelligence (AmI) provide new possibilities to contribute to personal care. For example, our car may monitor us and warn us when we are falling asleep while driving or take measures when we are too drunk to drive. As another example, an elderly person may wear a device that monitors his or her wellbeing and offer...
This work describes a cognitive heuristic allowing agents to assess trust and delegations merging heterogenous information sources. The model is realized through Uninformed Cognitive Maps, based on the combination of: (i) categorization abilities (ii) history of personal experiences (iii) context awareness.
Thesis: Macro-level social phenomena are implemented through the (social) actions and minds of the individuals. Without an
explicit theory of the agents' minds that founds, agents' behavior we cannot understand macro-level social phenomena, and
in particular how they work. AntiThesis: Mind is not enough: the theory of individual (social) mind and a...
A basic claim of this paper is that the foundational theoretical problem of the social sciences - the possibility of unconscious, unplanned forms of cooperation and intelligence among intentional agents (the very hard issue of the ‘invisible hand’, of the ‘spontaneous social order’ but also of ‘social functions’) - will eventually be clarified than...
This paper is an attempt to identify some basic principles and mechanisms of network waves due to a trust collapse. It is not a simulation study but a needed preliminary modeling for simulations on trust-networks dynamics. We identify different kinds of structural relations and of transmission mechanisms that predict possible contagions of the cris...
The aim of this paper is to show that conventions are sources of tacit agreements. Such agreements are tacit in the sense that they are implicated by what the agents do (or forbear to do) though without that any communication between them be necessary. Conventions are sources of tacit agreements under two substantial assumptions: (1) that there is...
Transitivity in trust is very often considered as a quite simple property, trivially inferable from the classical transitivity defined in mathematics, logic, or grammar. In fact the complexity of the trust notion suggests evaluating the relationships with the transitivity in a more adequate way. In this paper, starting from a socio-cognitive model...
Studies on trust in information sources have mostly focused on whether the source is capable of providing correct and complete information, thus overlooking another essential aspect of trust: The assessment of relevance. Information, even when true, is literally useless, unless it relates meaningfully to the informational needs and practical goals...
A crucial part of the intelligence that smart environments should display is a specific form of social intelligence: the ability to read human behavior and its traces in terms of underlying intentions and assumptions. Such ability is crucial to enable human users to tacitly coordinate and negotiate with smart and proactive digital environments. In...
Trust can be viewed at the same time as an instrument both for an agent selecting the right partners in order to achieve its own goals, and for an agent of being selected from other potential partners in order to establish with them a cooperation/collaboration and to take advantage from the accumulated trust. In this paper we will analyze trust as...
After arguing about the crucial importance of trust for Agents and MAS, we provide a definition of trust both as a mental state and as a social attitude and relation. We present the mental ingredients of trust: its specific beliefs and goals, with special attention to evaluations and expectations. We show the relation between trust and the mental b...
In this paper, I explain how we just "ascribe" "attribute" to social actors-in a fast and automatic way and without complex reasoning-mental representations on the basis of "scripts," "roles," role-signs, tool use and functions, categories and prejudices, and several heuristics; or by default. How scripts and roles must be filled in with the actors...
This chapter deals with the complex relationships between cognitive representations and processes (not reduced to “epistemic”
representations but including the motivational ones: goals) and emotions. It adopts a belief–desire–intention paradigm (the
explicit account of mental representations and of their “reading” in interaction), but psychological...
This work tries to provide a systematic outline of the manifold relations between emotion and anticipatory activity. We first
address the route from emotion to anticipation, which implies considering the anticipatory function of emotion in a twofold
sense. On the one hand, emotions may mediate the relationship between a stimulus and a response, by...
Trust is a complex notion -- with various components and dimensions-, and a multi-role relation: Trust (x y t G c); x trusts y as for action/task t useful for goal G, in context c. It is an attitude, a disposition towards another agent (natural, technical, or social) on which our "welfare", that is, the realization of some goal of us, depends. This...
Social interaction studies are carried out in Cognitive Science and AI on the basis of and as a means for conversational and speech act theories, an approach which is possibly misleading. We will try to “delinguistify” the model of social interaction.
Conversational and interactional studies are dominated by a “cooperativistic” or “benevolent” conc...
Typical solutions for agents assessing trust relies on the circulation of information on the individual level, i.e. reputational images, subjective experiences, statistical analysis, etc. This work presents an alternative approach, inspired to the cognitive heuristics enabling humans to reason at a categorial level. The approach is envisaged as a c...
This work aims to identify the constituents of forgiveness in terms of the forgiver's beliefs and motivating goals. After addressing the antecedents of forgiveness—a perceived wrong—and distinguishing the notion of mere harm from that of offense, we describe the victim's typical retributive reactions—revenge and resentment—and discuss their advanta...
In this paper we consider the special abilities needed by agents for assessing trust based on inference and reasoning. We analyze the case in which it is possible to infer trust towards un-known counterparts by reasoning on abstract classes or categories of agents shaped in a concrete application domain. We present a scenario of interacting agents...
A crucial issue for agents in open systems is the ability to filter out information sources in order to build an image of their counterparts, upon which a subjective evaluation of trust as a promoter of interactions can be assessed. While typical solutions discern relevant information sources by relying on previous experiences or reputational image...
We analyze how the power of an agent creates social power over the other agents: how an agent acquires new powers, and a given power becomes a different power: how a power is transferred from one agent to another one and accumulated: howco-powers require coordination. What is power 'alienation' and'subjection', and a power 'capital.
Within a network new links of the same kind can derive from previous links, but also new kinds of links/relations derive from previous relations, thus new kinds (levels) of networks derive from a given network. Both phenomena would need a systematic theory (especially in social domains), good definitions, and possibly simulation models for understa...
Projects
Projects (4)
> On Goal Theory:
- papers with Maria Micel (Loss of Motivation; Irrevocable goals);
- Theory of the “value” of goals;
- Theory of the “value”/utility of knowledge in relation to goals.
- How to combine Goal-driven (intentional) behaviot theory with Behaviorism and “responsive” behaviors.
- Differences and relations between true “goals” (mental, internal) and mere “functions” of behaviors.