View - ResearchGate

62 Socially Intelligent Agentsquires defining: (1) which forms of social intelligence these agents should haveand how they may be translated in terms of personality traits; (2) how a traitmay be represented in the agent’s mental state and reasoning style; (3) howvarious traits may be combined in the same individual; and finally (4) how oneor more traits may be manifested in the agent’s behaviour. In this chapter wediscuss our experience in building an Interface Agent that cooperates with theuser in performing software application tasks; we will focus our description onthe way that we formalised its cooperation attitude.2. Cooperation personalities in XDM-AgentResearch on personality-based Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has bedriven by results of studies about human intelligence—in particular, the Five-Factor Model (FFM) and the Interpersonal Circumplex Model (IC). The FFM[10] derives from the psychologists’ need of defining “the most important waysin which individuals differ in their enduring emotional, interpersonal, experiential,attitudinal and motivational styles” [10]. The five dimensions (Extraversion,Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Openness, and Conscientiousness)are an interpretation of results of applying factor analysis to questionnairessubmitted to various groups of subjects; their meaning is a subjective interpretationof the set of variables they “explain”, and is described with naturallanguage terms. “Sociability” or “Social closeness” is associated, in particular,with Extraversion. The second method employed to categorise humanpersonalities is Wiggins’ measure of IC [13], with axes “Dominance” and “Affiliation”.Whether the two factorisation criteria are related is not fully clear:some authors identify Extraversion with Dominance, while others argue thatExtraversion is best seen as located midway between Dominance and Warmth[10].Researchers in HCI have employed the two mentioned factorisation criteriato enrich interfaces with a personality. Some notable examples: Nass and colleaguesstudied graphical interfaces in terms of Dominance and agent-basedinterfaces in terms of Extraversion [11]; Dryer adopted the IC model [8]; Andréand colleagues [1] attach Extraversion and Agreeableness to the membersof their “Presentation Teams”; Ball and Breese [3] included Dominance andFriendliness in their modelling of personality-related observable behaviour. Tocomputer scientists, the advantage of referring to the two mentioned models isto have a widely accepted frame of reference, with a definition of the way thatevery personality factor manifests itself in the external behaviour. The maindisadvantage is that these personality traits refer to a characterisation of communicationstyles rather than to mental social attitudes. They are thereforevery useful for endowing agents with a “pleasant” and “believable” appearance,but not to express diversification in social relationships. Another diffi-