A COMPUTER MODEL OF ELEMENTARY SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

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A COMPUTER MODEL OF ELEMENTARY SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

• By John t. Gullahorn Jeanne E. Gullahorn
• ???? ????
• 98132-506 ???

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Contents

• Introduction
• The program
• Proposition 1 Stimulus and Response
• Proposition 2 Frequency and Recency or reward
• Proposition 3 Assessing the reward
• Proposition 4 Derivation-Satiation aspect
• Proposition 5 Distributive justice
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Solomon Asch(1952)
• To act in the social field requires a knowledge
  of social facts-of persons and groups.
• George Homans Social Behavior
• one of most provocative explanations of human
  response in interpersonal situations
• Model human behavior as a function of its payoff
  an individuals responses depends on the amount
  and quality of reward and punishment his actions
  elicit
• Use Blaus description of interpersonal behavior
  in a bureaucracy(Blau, 1955)

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Introduction

• Blaus description of interpersonal behavior
• 16 agents holding the same title
• Interaction as an exchange of values
• Requesting help
• Being abled to do a better job lt-gt implicitly
  admitting his inferiority to a colleague
• Gain prestige lt-gt time taken from his own work

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The program

• HOMUNCULUS
• Model elementary social behavior in the form of a
  computer program written in Information
  Processing Language(Newell, 1961e)
• hypothetical agents, Ted and George
• person as information processing organism

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The program(2)

• IPL-V, list processing language
• person is represented as a list structure
  containing a large number of description lists.

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Flow chart

• figure 1 figure 3

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Propostion 1

• Stimulus and response generalization
• If in the recent past the occurrence of a
  particular stimulus-situation has been the
  occasion on which a mans activity has been
  rewarded, then the more similar the present
  stimulus-situation is to the past one, the more
  likely he is to emit the activity, or some
  similar activity, now

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Proposition 1

• George considers whether AR is a general sitmulus
  situation in which his responses have been
  rewarded (P1, box IV)
• George searches a memory list of reinforced
  stimulus situations to determine whether the
  present input is among them.
• Determine if his responses have been rewarded by
  (Ted) -gt deeper search
• Consider response alternatives

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Proposition 2

• Frequency and recency of reinforcement(P2, box
  XXIII)
• The more often within a given period of time a
  mans activity rewards the activity of another,
  the more often the other will emit the activity
• Rough estimate of the frequency with which Ted
  has rewarded each of the activities he is
  considering in response to Teds current request
  for help

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Proposition 2

• Frequency - set a counter?
• But people seem to use a less refined means of
  measurements -gt crude five-point ordinal scale
  for reward frequency
• Emotional salience -gt determine thru trials in
  controlled conditions

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Proposition 3

• Assessing the value of the anticipated
  rewards(P3, Box XXIV)
• The more valuable to a man a unit of the
  activity another gives him, the more often he
  will emit activity rewarded by the activity of
  the other
• ex) Complimenting in front of colleagues gt Hmm,
  thanks gt Well, sorry I bothered you

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Proposition 4

• The deprivation-satiation aspect(P4, Box XXV)
• The more often a man has in the recent past
  received a rewarding activity from another, the
  less valuable any further unit of that activity
  becomes to him

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Proposition 4

• George evaluate his relative deprivation with
  reference to the rewards he anticipates from Ted
• Search the description lists of each of the
  anticipated rewards to determine the degree of
  Georges current deprivation or satiation
• A deprivation-satiation score is stored as the
  value of a special attribute on the description
  list of each activity.

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Proposition 4

• Cost of the proposed response(Box XXVII)
• Homans the cost of an activity is the value of
  the reward obtainable through an alternative
  activity.
• Compare the over-all expected reward from Ted
  with the anticipated reward from continuing with
  his own work

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Proposition 5

• Distributive justice
• The more to a mans disadvantage the rule of
  distributive justice fails of realization, the
  more likely he is to display the emotional
  behavior we call anger
• Social norm or accepted expectations for behavior
  within a group

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Proposition 5

• Programmed Interpretation
• Whether a stimulus is appropriate in the given
  circumstances(P5, Box I)
• Time spent solving problem as being help if no
  reward -gt Change its own image list of Tom and
  expect greater thanks next time-gt if No reward
  again, Warning signal set -gt Next, response anger
  or storing aggression. (but before, George assess
  the consequences of such behavior)

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Conclusion

• We are reducing complex social behavior to symbol
  manipulating processes
• Deterministic rather than probabilistic
• Decision making processing is assumed to be
  serial
• Person as an hypothesis testing, information
  processing organism

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Conclusion

• HOMUNCULUS is an attempt to explicate the ability
  of a person engaged in normal social interaction
  to evaluate the context of behavior, retrieve
  information necessary to project alternative
  plans of action, and before actually committing
  himself overtly - to select the conditions under
  which he will emit one activity rather than
  another.