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Chapter 2UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INTELLIGENCEPer Persson ½ , Jarmo Laaksolahti ½ and Peter Lönnqvist ¾½ Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista, Sweden, ¾ Department of Computer and SystemsSciences, Stockholm University and Royal Institute of TechnologyAbstractBelievable social interaction is not only about agents that look right but also dothe right thing. To achieve this we must consider the everyday knowledge andexpectations by which users make sense of real, fictive or artificial social beings.This folk-theoretical understanding of other social beings involves several,rather independent, levels such as expectations on behaviour, expectations onprimitive psychology, models of folk-psychology, understanding of traits, socialroles and empathy. Implications for Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) researchare discussed.1. IntroductionAgent technology refers to a set of software approaches that are shiftingusers’ view of information technology from tools to actors. Tools react onlywhen interacted with, while agents act autonomously and proactively, sometimesoutside the user’s awareness. With an increasing number of autonomousagents and robots making their way into aspects of our everyday life, usersare encouraged to understand them in terms of human behaviour and intentionality.Reeves and Nass [5] have shown that people relate to computers -as well as other types of media - as if they were ’real’, e.g., by being politeto computers. However, some systems seem to succeed better than others inencouraging such anthropomorphic attributions, creating a more coherent andtransparent experience [20]. What are the reasons for this? What encouragesusers to understand a system in terms of human intentionality, emotion and cognition?What shapes users’ experiences of this kind? Software agent researchoften focuses on the graphical representation of agents. Synchronisation of lipmovements and speech, gestures and torso movements as well as the quality ofthe graphical output itself are questions that have been investigated [6] [14]. In