Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach - Bruce Edmonds

5 Conditions for the Occurrence of Social Embedding

What might enable the emergence of social embeddedness? At this point one can only speculate, but some factors are suggested by the above model. They might be:

the ability of agents significantly to effect their environment - so that they are not limited to an essentially passive predictive role;
the co-development of the agents - for example, if agents had co-evolved during a substantial part of the development of their genes then maybe this evolution would have taken advantage of the behaviour of the other agents; this would be analogous to the way different mechanisms in one organism develop so that they have multiple and overlapping functions that defy their strict separation [33];
the existence of exploitable computational resources in the environment (in particular, the society) - so that it would be in the interest of agents to use these resources as opposed to performing the inferences and modelling themselves;
the possibility of open-ended modelling by agents, i.e. that there is no practical limit to the variety or complexity of such models - if the space of possible models was essentially small (so that an approximation to a global search could be performed), then the optimal model of the society that the agent inhabited would be feasible for it;
mechanisms for social distinction (e.g. a naming mechanism) and hence the ability to develop the selective modelling of information sources, which depends on there being a real variety of distinguishable sources to select from*1;

the ability to frequently sample and probe social information (i.e. gossip), so that individual intelligence might both have enabled the development of social embedding as well as being selected for it (as in the `social intelligence hypothesis' discussed in [23]).

What is unclear from the above model and analysis is the role that imitation plays in the development (or suppression) of social embeddedness, particularly where both imitation and conversational communication are present. In [9], Kerstin Dautenhahn suggests that imitation may have a role in the effectiveness of an agent to cope with a complex social situation (or rather not cope as a result of autism). The above model suggests that, at least sometimes, imitation may have a role in simplifying social situations so that such embedding does not occur.

Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach - Bruce Edmonds - 30 OCT 98

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