Creating Social and Cultural Agents - Autenticação · Creating Social and Cultural Agents ... resultados sugerem que o modelo proposto e de facto capaz de criar ... 2.2.1 Geert

Creating Social and Cultural Agents

Samuel Francisco Mascarenhas

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em

Engenharia Informática e de Computadores

Júri

Presidente: Professor Doutor Nuno João Neves Mamede

Orientador: Professor Doutor Rui Filipe Fernandes Prada

Vogais: Professora Doutora Ana Maria Severino Almeida e Paiva

Professor Doutor Helder Manuel Ferreira Coelho

Maio 2009

Resumo

Com o constante aumento do desenvolvimento de agentes autonomos, surge uma crescente

procura pela capacidade dos mesmos interagirem num contexto social, de forma semelhante

aos humanos. Como resultado, varias arquitecturas de agentes comecaram a considerar diversos

factores sociais para guiar o comportamento dos seus agentes. Contudo, os aspectos culturais

tem sido bastante negligenciados, apesar de serem elementos cruciais das sociedades humanas.

Esta dissertacao propoe um modelo de cultura baseado em tres aspectos importantes de

culturas humanas: (1) Dimensoes Culturais; (2) Sımbolos e (3) Rituais. O proposito do modelo

consiste em desenvolver uma arquitectura de agentes que possibilite a criacao de diferentes

grupos culturais de personagens sinteticos. Para tal, utilizou-se uma arquitectura ja existente,

na qual se efectuou a integracao destes elementos.

Para aferir se a nova arquitectura permite expressar diferencas culturais de comportamento,

criaram-se diferentes grupos de agentes que apenas diferiram na sua cultura associada. Para

avaliar o efeito dos elementos culturais implementados na percepcao de diferentes culturas,

realizaram-se duas experiencias com os grupos criados. A primeira pretendeu avaliar o efeito

dos rituais (e sımbolos associados), enquanto que a segunda pretendeu avaliar o efeito das

dimensoes culturais. Ambas as experiencias originaram resultados positivos e significativos. Os

resultados sugerem que o modelo proposto e de facto capaz de criar culturas perceptivelmente

distintas.

Palavras-Chave: Cultura, Agentes Autonomos, Agentes Socialmente Inteligentes, Per-

sonagens Sinteticos, Ambientes Virtuais Interactivos.

Abstract

With the increasing development of autonomous agents, there is a bigger demand on their

capability of interacting with other agents in a social context, in ways that are natural and

inspired by how humans and other species interact. As a result, many agent architectures are

taking into account a plenitude of social factors to drive their agents’ behaviour. However,

culture has been largely neglected so far, even though it is a crucial aspect of human societies.

This dissertation proposes a culture model based on three important behavioural elements

of human cultures: (1) Cultural Dimensions; (2) Symbols and (3) Rituals. The purpose of

the model is to attain an agent architecture that facilitates the generation of different cultural

groups of synthetic characters. As such, we defined these elements and integrated them into

an already existent agent architecture.

With the new architecture, and in order to assess if it is possible to express different cultural

behaviour in synthetic characters, we created different groups of agents that only differed in

their associated cultures. Using these groups, two experiments were conducted to evaluate

the effect of the implemented elements in the user’s perception of different cultures. The first

experiment evaluated the effect of rituals (and associated symbols), while the second one the

effect of the cultural dimensions component. Both experiments yielded significant and positive

results, which suggest that our model is indeed capable of creating distinguishable cultures.

Keywords: culture, autonomous agents, social intelligent agents, synthetic characters,

interactive virtual environments.

Acknowledgments

First, I want to express my gratitude to everyone at GAIPS / INESC-ID for welcoming me

with such friendliness into their group. In particular, I would like to thank my supervisors,

Professora Ana Paiva and Professor Rui Prada, for presenting me with such a wonderful

opportunity to perform investigation on my favourite computer science field. Their strong

guidance, trust, and encouragement were crucial for completing this document.

Also, I would like to give a very special thanks to Joao Dias for being the one who introduced

me to GAIPS; for his contributions to this work; for constantly providing insightful comments

and suggestions; for being always available to answer any doubts I had (even late at night);

and most of all, for being such a great friend. I would also like to mention a special gratitude

to Nuno Afonso, Rui Figueiredo and Pedro Sequeira for their precious help.

Moreover, I want to thank all the members of the eCircus project team, for giving me the

opportunity to see how nice it is to work in an European project. In particular, I would like

to thank Mey Yii Lim for her contributions.

Also, I would like to thank my girlfriend, Carmen Romao. All her love, dedication, support,

and understanding made this journey much more easier.

Finally, I want to dedicate this dissertation to my family, especially to my Father who left

this world when I was still young. He will always be remembered as my personal hero. I hope

he is proud. Thank you.

i

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 The Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

1.3 Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Related Work 5

2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2.2 Background on Culture and Synthetic Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2.2.1 Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.2.2 Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

2.3 Culture in Synthetic Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.3.1 CUBE-G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

2.3.2 Kyra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2.3.3 Tactical Language Training System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.4 Agent Architectures for Social and Cultural Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

2.4.1 PsychSim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

2.4.2 SGD Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

2.4.3 CAB Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

2.5 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

3 Conceptual Model 27

3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

3.2 Culture Specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

3.3 Cultural Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

3.3.1 Goal Utility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

3.3.2 Emotional Appraisal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

ii

CONTENTS iii

3.4 Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

3.5 Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35


4 Implementation 39

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

4.2 FAtiMA-PSI (Baseline Architecture) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

4.3 Cultural Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

4.3.1 Symbols Parametrisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

4.3.2 Symbol Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

4.3.3 Motivational State of Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

4.3.4 Dimensions Parametrisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

4.3.5 Cultural Goal Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

4.3.6 Cultural Appraisal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

4.3.7 Rituals Parametrisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

4.3.8 Ritual Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53


5 Case Studies 57

5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

5.2 First Case Study - ORIENT Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

5.3 Second Case Study - Dinner Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

5.3.1 Character Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

5.3.2 Culture Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

5.3.3 Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

5.3.4 Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

5.3.5 Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64


6 Evaluation 67

6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

6.2 Objective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

6.3 First Experiment - Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

iv CONTENTS

6.3.1 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

6.3.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

6.4 Second Experiment - Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

6.4.1 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

6.4.2 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71


7 Conclusion 77

7.1 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

A Rituals Questionnaire 87

B Dimensions Questionnaire 91

CONTENTS v

List of Figures

2.1 The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

2.2 Screenshot of the Mission Practice Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

2.3 SGD Model Agent’s Architecture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

2.4 Example of a socio-cultural network in CAB. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

3.1 Giving Food Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

4.1 FAtiMA-PSI Agent Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

4.2 Cultural Agent Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

4.3 Motivational States of Two Different Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

5.1 Screenshot of ORIENT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

5.2 Characters at the dinner table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

5.3 Dinner Ritual (Low Power Distance Culture) - Screenshot Sequence. . . . . . . 64

5.4 Dinner Ritual (High Power Distance Culture) - Screenshot Sequence. . . . . . . 64

6.1 Results for: Do you think the differences are related to the culture or personality? 75

vi

LIST OF FIGURES vii

List of Tables

2.1 Hofstede’s ratings for ten selected countries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.2 Reviewed Systems’ Comparison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

4.1 Symbol parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

4.2 Cultural dimensions parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

4.3 Ritual parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

6.1 First Experiment - Results for the user’s adjective classification . . . . . . . . . 70

6.2 Second experiment - Results for the statements classification. . . . . . . . . . . 72

6.3 Second experiment - Results for the user’s adjective classification. . . . . . . . . 73

viii

LIST OF TABLES ix

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Motivation

Nowadays, the world is becoming a much smaller place, in the sense that people from different

cultures have more chances to contact with each other than ever before. As such, intercultural

awareness is becoming increasingly important. From a business perspective, companies are

growing globally and conducting business in countries that have very different cultures. A

cultural misunderstanding may result in a loss of an important deal, and thus companies

are starting to provide intercultural training to their employees. From a social perspective,

groups of people that have a distinct culture from the majority (usually called subcultures),

are becoming larger. Lack of understanding about these subcultures can often lead to the

creation of stereotypes that generate prejudice and discrimination.

The greater need for intercultural training has lead to the development of educating meth-

ods that are growing more demanding and complex. Passive methods such as lectures, manu-

als, films, are generally sufficient if the desired outcome is simply the acquisition of knowledge.

However, active methods are more suitable when the desired outcome is for trainees to modify

their attitudes, adopt new values and change their perspective on culture [34]. Some of these

active methods are: real-life role-plays, real-life simulations games (e.g. Barnga), or cross-

cultural dialogues. As reported in [34], each one of these methods has its own advantages and

disadvantages. For instance, real-life role-playing makes it possible to experience the role of

someone else, developing empathy and understanding, but is also very time-consuming, and in

some cases, players can be too shy to participate. Similarly, simulation games, eliminate the

gap between learning and applying, and can be used with large numbers of people. However,

1

2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

they are also time consuming and usually require a substantial minimum number of players.

Facing these methodological issues, researchers have already begun to explore the use of

computational applications for providing new answers. In particular, there’s currently an

ongoing research on Intelligent Virtual Environments (IVEs) as another type of active method

for general educational purposes. In an IVE, similarly to a real-life role-play, a user can

experience the role of someone else while exploring a computer-generated virtual world. Also,

being a simulation game, the user gets to apply his knowledge, deciding which actions to take

given the situation. Furthermore, there is no dependency on the number of other human

participants, since the virtual world can be populated with autonomous synthetic characters

that behave in an human-like manner. Finally, the user can feel safe to face complicated social

situations and challenges, since his actions won’t have any consequences outside the virtual

world. Therefore, the significant advantage of IVEs is that they can, in theory, combine the

strengths of the active methods presented above, while simultaneously solving their related

issues.

Despite having these great advantages, the development of IVEs is still in the beginning

and there are still many challenging problems to be solved. Many of these problems come from

the fact that users want to experience the same kinds of social dynamics they would experience

in the real world, especially when interacting with synthetic characters that resemble human

beings. As such, we are witnessing a large increase on the study of agent architectures that

take into account social interactions, such as human dialogue and emotional responses.

However, culture which is a fundamental aspect of human societies, has been largely ne-

glected so far. As a consequence, the social richness of the IVEs is significantly diminished,

since the behaviour of the characters usually ends up being distinguishable only by individual

differences. While not having culture embedded in the minds of the characters can be suffi-

cient for dealing with simple real-world scenarios, we believe it is important for dealing with

more complex scenarios and essential if we wish to build IVEs that are specifically designed

for increasing intercultural awareness.

1.2 The Problem

This dissertation discusses the role of culture in the creation of groups of synthetic characters

in order to help build IVEs that are socially richer. Our objective is to address the following

1.3. OUTLINE 3

problem:

How can we build different cultural groups of autonomous synthetic characters that

exhibit distinguishable differences in their patterns of behaviour, similar to those

found in real human cultures?

To deal with this problem, we will not try to cover every aspect of human cultures due

to their enormous complexity. Instead we will focus on the more universal aspects of human

cultures that are closely related to different patterns of behaviour and reasoning. Coming

from an AI perspective, we are primarily concerned with the possibility of representing these

general aspects in an autonomous agent architecture. As such, we will not look into cultural

differences such as aesthetic styles, dialects, accents, and so forth.

Therefore, regarding the problem previously stated, our main hypothesis to be proven is:

If the behaviour of autonomous synthetic characters is driven by an agent archi-

tecture with an explicit model of culture, that is inspired by some aspects of human

cultures, users will be able to recognise cultural differences in different groups of

characters that differ exclusively in their cultural specification.

In order to prove this hypothesis we will search for anthropology studies that point out

common and relevant elements of human cultures. Based on these studies, we will define

a cultural model that encompasses such elements and apply it in an agent architecture for

synthetic characters. Afterwards, we will use the architecture to create different cultural

groups of such characters. We will then perform an evaluation to determine the impact of our

model in the user’s perception of cultural differences in the created groups.

1.3 Outline

This document is divided in six different chapters.

Chapter 2 (Related Work) starts with a brief theoretical background on culture. After-

wards, we discuss some work previously done on culture-specific synthetic characters and also

on architectures for social and cultural agents. This chapter ends with a discussion about the

systems reviewed.

Chapter 3 (Conceptual Model) discusses the conceptual model proposed for the culture

representation in the synthetic characters.

4 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

Chapter 4 (Implementation) describes an implementation of the previously defined model

extending an already existent autonomous agent architecture.

Chapter 5 (Case Studies) describes two case studies developed to evaluate the agent archi-

tecture. The first is a serious game for developing inter-cultural empathy. The second involves

the creation of different cultural groups of characters acting out a common real-life situation.

Chapter 6 (Evaluation) describes two experiments we conducted to evaluate our cultural

agents.

Finally, in Chapter 7 (Conclusion), we provide a summary of the work developed in this

dissertation and discuss some future work.

Chapter 2

Related Work

2.1 Introduction

This chapter is organised in three main sections. In the first section we will review the concept

of culture and present important anthropology studies we found relevant to achieve our goals.

In the next section, we discuss computational projects concerning the adaptation of synthetic

characters to different cultures. Then, in the last section, we review agent architectures specif-

ically designed to create agents with social and cultural behaviour. Finally, we conclude this

chapter with an analysis of the systems reviewed, stressing the influence that they had on the

development of this thesis.

2.2 Background on Culture and Synthetic Cultures

The concept of culture has been studied for many years by anthropologists and other be-

havioural scientists. In 1871, Edward B. Tylor, defined culture in [57] as ”that complex whole

which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and

habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Since then, many other possible definitions

have surged. In 1952, a list containing 164 possible definitions of culture was compiled by

Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhonn [33].

Nevertheless, Robert J. House et al. [27] affirms that ”despite lack of consensus among

scholars, there are several essential common threads that run throughout the various concep-

tualisations and definitions of the construct generally referred to as culture.” He considers that

culture often refers to ”collectivities in which the members share several psychological com-

5

6 CHAPTER 2. RELATED WORK

monalities - assumptions, beliefs, values, interpretations of events (meanings), social identities,

and motives - and abide by a set of shared norms in a common manner.” In other words, culture

can be broadly defined as a set of symbols and behaviour patterns that are learnt and shared

by a group of individuals. However, an important question emerges from this broad definition:

Which specific symbols and behaviour patterns establish different cultures? Anthropologists

are still debating over this issue.

Perhaps the most comprehensive and cited study about differences in cultures comes from

Geert Hofstede [24, 26]. Culture, according to him, is ”the collective programming of the mind

that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” [24]. These

”mental programs” refer to patterns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting that are shared

and learnt by members of the same culture. These patterns can manifest themselves at an

implicit level, under the form of values, or at a more clearly observable level, under the form

of rituals, heroes and symbols.

The four types of cultural manifestations can be described as follows: (1) Values - represent

cultural preconceptions about what is desirable/undesirable; (2) Rituals - are essential social

activities that are carried out in a predetermined fashion; (3) Heroes - real or even imaginary

persons that serve as models for the cultural values; (4) Symbols - words, gestures, pictures,

or objects that members of a given culture have assigned a special particular meaning.

2.2.1 Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

Asides from the cultural manifestations presented above, Hofstede proposes five dimensions on

which cultures vary [24]. Different from the previous manifestations, which can be very specific

to a certain culture or subculture (e.g. the Japanese tea ceremony), Hofstede argues that these

dimensions are universal. They are directly based on the culture’s values and indicate general

behavioural tendencies shared by the members of the culture. However, they should be not

considered deterministic, since other factors such as the individual’s personality, also play an

important role on human behaviour. We will now describe each one of these five dimensions:

1. Power Distance Index (PDI) - the degree to which less powerful members of the

group expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.

• Small PDI Cultures - in these cultures (e.g. Austria), the power relations are

usually more consultative or democratic, and people tend to regard others as equals

2.2. BACKGROUND ON CULTURE AND SYNTHETIC CULTURES 7

despite their formal status. Special privileges are usually disapproved, and powerful

people try to look the same as less powerful people. Power is usually decentralised,

and everyone’s opinion matters, including children. Moreover, people from these

cultures are usually informal and unceremonious.

• High PDI Cultures - cultures that have a high power distance (e.g. Malaysia)

tend to accept power relations that are more autocratic, and people usually respect

and acknowledge the power of others just by their formal status. Powerful people

have more privileges and like to wear symbols that reflect their status. Power is

usually centralised, and less powerful people need to ask permission to speak in a

discussion. Although very verbal, people usually talk in a soft and polite manner.

Finally, when problems arise, the tendency is to shift blame downwards in the

hierarchy.

2. Individualism (IDV) - versus its opposite, collectivism, indicates the extent to which

individuals see themselves integrated into groups.

• Collectivistic Cultures - people from these cultures (e.g. Guatemala), are usually

integrated into strong and cohesive groups that are an integral part of their identity.

In these groups, everyone looks out for one another in exchange for unquestioning

loyalty. Therefore, relationships are very important, and the harmony of the group

should always be maintained, avoiding direct confrontations. Moreover, laws and

right are expected to differ by group.

• Individualistic Cultures - these cultures (e.g. USA), tend to stress the impor-

tance of personal achievements and individual rights. People are expected to be

only responsible for themselves and their immediate family. Self-definition is based

on personal cues (personality, values, and physical attributes). Relationships are

less important than the task at hand, and other people tend to be measured by

their usefulness. Moreover, when in groups, people like to stand out visually.

3. Masculinity (MAS) - versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles

between genders.

• Feminine Cultures - in a very feminine culture (e.g. Sweden), relationships and

quality of life are very important. Men and women are supposed to be modest,


soft-spoken, and care for the weak. Compromise and negotiation are used to solve

conflicts. Both sexes should have equal rights and responsibilities. Moreover, people

are generally warm and friendly in a conversation.

• Masculine Cultures - a very masculine culture (e.g. Japan) favours assertiveness,

ambition, efficiency, competition and materialism. Also, differences between gender

roles are accentuated. Men are supposed to be ambitious and tough, while women

should be subservient and tender. Conflicts are settled by arguing or fighting them

out. Moreover, people are generally hard to please, tend to be overachievers, and

blame others for their mistakes.

4. Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) - this dimension indicates to what extent

people prefer structured over unstructured situations.

• Low UAI Cultures - cultures with a low UAI (e.g. Singapore), have as few rules

as possible, and people are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are

used to. Unfamiliar risks and ambiguous situations cause no discomfort, and people

have few taboos. Moreover, people are generally patient, relaxed, informal, and tend

to work hard only when it is needed. Open-ended questions and innovative ideas

are very common in conversations. Finally, emotions and aggression are usually

hidden.

• High UAI Cultures - these cultures (e.g. Portugal), tend to have strict laws and

rules, and also various safety and security measures to avoid situations that are

novel, unknown, ambiguous, surprising, or different from usual. At an emotional

level, people are more expressive and motivated by their inner nervous energy. Usu-

ally, these cultures have rigid beliefs and strong taboos. Moreover, people tend to

be organised and seek specialisation.

5. Long-Term Orientation (LTO) - indicates to what extent the future has more im-

portance than the past or present.

• Short-Term Oriented Cultures - respect for tradition, quick results, fulfilling

social obligations and reciprocation of gifts and favors are greatly valued in short

term oriented cultures (e.g. Nigeria). People are ceremonious, live day by day, and

usually talk a lot, particularly about the past.


• Long-Term Oriented Cultures - in these cultures (e.g. China), people give

more importance to the future than the past and present. Pragmatism, thrift, hard

working, prosperity and perseverance are greatly valued. People may devote their

lives to philosophical ideals. Moreover, people tend to talk in a direct and focused

manner.

The foundation for Hofstede’s theory is a large empirical study of IBM’s employees in more

than 70 countries analysed. Table 2.1 shows the ratings (the * indicates that the value is

unknown) of the ten countries that were used above as examples.

PDI IDV MAS UAI LTO

Austria 11 55 79 70 *

China 80 20 66 40 118

Guatemala 95 6 37 101 *

Japan 54 46 95 92 80

Malaysia 104 26 50 36 *

Nigeria 77 20 46 54 16

Portugal 63 27 31 104 *

Singapore 74 20 48 8 48

Sweden 31 71 5 29 33

US 40 91 62 46 29

Table 2.1: Hofstede’s ratings for ten selected countries.

In Exploring Culture [26], Hofstede et. al. introduced ten synthetic cultures, which are ex-

treme manifestations of the value orientations at both ends of the cultural dimensions presented

above. Real cultures, unlike the synthetic ones, have elements of all dimensions, and may not

fall in the extreme side of any particular dimension. Synthetic cultures, on the other hand,

simplify the complex notion of culture, by isolating the behavioural tendencies specific to each

extreme. Therefore, they can be used as an intercultural training technique to simulate cross-

cultural encounters. Moreover, since synthetic cultures aren’t literal representations of any

culture from the real world, it is more unlikely that trainees will object to the generalisations

made.


2.2.2 Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity

To study the effectiveness of an intercultural training tool, it is essential to have a good

understanding of the different predispositions and preconceptions a person has on cultural

differences. Some techniques may present excellent results in a person that already accepts the

existence of these differences and fail miserably if such existence is denied. In order to achieve

this understanding, the developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (DMIS), which was

built by Milton Bennett [8, 9, 10, 34], provides a valuable framework to explain people’s

different reactions in the presence of intercultural situations. He examined several students

over the course of months and sometimes years in various intercultural workshops, classes,

exchanges, and graduate programs. In this study, he detected common behavioural tendencies

among the students, and based on grounded theory, he organised these tendencies into six

stages of increasing sensitivity to cultural difference (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1: The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity

The first three DMIS stages are ethnocentric, meaning that one’s own culture is experienced

as central to reality in some way:

• Denial - people at this stage will generally show a lack of interest in cultural differences,

experiencing their own culture as the only real one. Reasoning about other cultures is

avoided by maintaining psychological and/or physical isolation and attempts to address

intercultural issues head-on are likely to result in bewilderment and even hostility.

• Defense - one’s worldview is divided into ”us and them” and one’s own culture is


experienced as being the only good one. People tend to demonstrate an ”under siege”

attitude by heavily criticising other cultures. From an outsider point of view, members

of the host culture seem to be trying to defend their supposed cultural privileges even

though they may not think that way at a conscious level. On the other hand, members

of the guest culture feel as if their cultural identities are being threatened by the pressure

to assimilate their host’s culture.

• Minimization - a universal view of culture is adopted and cultural divergences are

trivialised to a superficial level. Differences in etiquette and customs are recognised but

more complex aspects of one’s behaviour are thought to be similar throughout all cultures.

Since others are viewed as similar, people at the Minimization stage try excessively to

correct the behaviours of other culture’s members.

The second three DMIS stages are ethnorelative, meaning that one’s own culture is expe-

rienced in the context of other cultures:

• Acceptance - at this stage, other cultures are experienced as equally complex but

having different constructions of reality. People, in general, will demonstrate curiosity

and respect for cultural differences. However, the acceptance of these differences does

not translate directly to their agreement or liking.

• Adaptation - people at this stage are capable to take the perspective of another cul-

ture worldview, thus they may deliberately adapt their behaviour to communicate more

effectively in an intercultural situation. This ability is seen as cultural empathy, which

can be described as ”the attempt to organise experience through a set of constructs that

are more characteristic of another culture than of one’s own.” [34] A more elaborate

discussion about this type of empathy is found in [10].

• Integration - the final stage of the DMIS is commonly found in members of minority

cultural groups or long-term expatriates. Even though people at this stage are multicul-

tural in their worldview, they aren’t necessarily better in intercultural situations, since

they might be unable to select appropriate behaviour in a given cultural setting. People

in this stage often need to reestablish their identity, which was somewhat lost in their

cultural multiplicity in order to embrace their extended experience of culture.


The fundamental assumption of the model is that intercultural competence increases as

one’s experience of cultural difference becomes more complex and sophisticated. As we have

seen, each stage represents a different development of the cognitive structure, reflected by

different kinds of attitudes. While the ethnocentric stages are related to avoidance of cultural

difference, the ethnorelative ones can be seen as ways of seeking cultural difference.

The theoretical basis of the DMIS is personal construct theory and its extension, radical

constructivism. Personal construct theory was formulated by George Kelly, who states that

experience is a function of our classification, or interpretation of events. According to this

theory: ”A person can be a witness to a tremendous parade of episodes and yet, if he fails

to keep making something out of them, he gains little in the way of experience from having

been around when they happened. It is not what happens around him that makes a man

experienced; it is the successive construing and reconstruing of what happens, as it happens,

that enrich the experience of his life.” [32]

This model has been successfully employed in several intercultural education and training

programs. Trainers use it to diagnose client’s readiness to different types of training and to

choose and sequence appropriate training strategies. For our work, the model can be useful

to measure one’s development of intercultural sensitivity, when interacting with cultural and

social agents.

2.3 Culture in Synthetic Characters

A substantial part of the work done on culture in synthetic characters involves the adaptation

of the characters to a particular culture or to the user’s culture. In this line of work, we

decided to review GUBE-G, a project that uses Hofstede’s dimensions for inferring the cultural

background of a user (using Nintendo’s Wii remote controller), and for adapting the nonverbal

behaviour of embodied conversational agents according to the user’s culture. Afterwards, we

look at the framework used to design Kyra, a synthetic character adapted for three different

countries, discussing cultural differences that were taken into consideration for the character’s

design. Finally, we discuss the Tactical Language Training System, an IVE where users interact

with characters from a foreign culture in order to train the culture’s spoken language and

gestures.

2.3. CULTURE IN SYNTHETIC CHARACTERS 13

2.3.1 CUBE-G

CUBE-G [50] stands for ”CUlture-adaptive BEhavior Generation for interactions with embod-

ied conversational agents”. It is an interdisciplinary project funded by the German Research

Foundation (DFG). Even though CUBE-G focus exclusively in expressive behaviour, it is one

of the few known computational systems that parameterise cultural behaviour in synthetic

characters. The main goal of the project is to build a system where embodied conversational

agents are capable of adjusting their expressive behaviour to the user’s culture. To achieve this

goal, two tasks are addressed: (1) defining the cultural specific behaviour, and (2) inferring

the user’s cultural background trough the use of sensors.

For the first task, the computation model of culture used is based on the cultural dimensions

of Hofstede [9], and the correlations suggested by him in [10], between extreme positions on

each dimension and the following six variables of expressive behaviour: (1) overall activation

- number of gestures in a specific time; (2) spatial extent - how much space a gestures uses;

(3) speed - temporal extent of movements; (4) power - the strength of gestures; (5) sound -

how loud the agents speak; (6) distance - how far apart agents stand while they interact. Note

that the first four variables were used before by Bevacqua [11] in defining the expressivity of

gestures.

For the last task, due to the functionality of the sensor used (Nintendo’s Wii remote

controller), only the gestural expressivity (overall activation, spatial extent, and speed) of the

user is analysed. Gaze and speech, although also considered important aspects of observable

behaviour for deriving the user’s culture, are left out of the analysis.

Since there might be a specific user that deviates from his cultural prototypical behaviour,

and given the imperfections of the recognition system used, the model has to deal with unre-

liable and incomplete information. This led to the decision of using Bayesian networks which,

as described in [28] , are a formalism to represent probabilistic causal interactions.

To better understand how the model works, we will give the example presented in [50]: Let’s

suppose that the user’s gestures are slow, not powerful, not extended in space, and the overall

activation is unknown (only one gesture was detected). With these evidences, the Bayesian

network is updated to allow for inferring, in a diagnostic way, the user’s cultural Background.

The probability is then propagated via the dimensional nodes to the culture node, and the

system estimates the user to belong to a Swedish culture (see Table 2.1 for Sweden’s ratings).


Afterwards, the agent’s behaviour is set accordingly: they stand far away from each other,

speak in a mid voice, do not gesture much, and when they actually do a gesture, they do it

slowly and with little spatial extent. If the user’s gestures were slower and wider, than the

inferred culture would be Chinese and the agents would move closer, and would use more,

wider and more powerful gestures.

2.3.2 Kyra

Kyra [39] is a synthetic character with autonomous behaviour and personality traits, devel-

oped by students and researchers at Stanford University’s School of Education and Computer

Science Department and Extempo Systems Inc. Kyra is presented as trendy girl with about

twelve years old, which attempts to motivate and educate preteens, about artistic expression

values and art history tendencies. Users interact with the character through a website where

they can communicate by typing text messages. Kyra, on the other side, communicates by

gestures, textual, and spoken utterances. Furthermore, Kyra has a complex mechanism for

understanding natural language, a mood system, and a user’s model that allows her to respond

in an appropriate manner to the user’s sentences.

The main goal in Kyra’s design was to create a believable character that could give the

illusion of life through the user’s suspension of disbelief [56] (the user perceives the character

as if it has a life of his own, dismissing its artificial nature). Initially, the character was built

for an American audience, but later a Venezuelan and Brazilian Kyra were created, aiming to

better appease the users from those countries.

To achieve believability, the authors propose a framework of ten key characteristic qualities:

(1) identity, (2) backstory, (3) appearance, (4) content of speech, (5) manner of speaking, (6)

manner of gesturing, (7) emotional dynamics, (8) social interaction patterns, (9) role and (10)

role dynamics. These characteristics ”both define and are defined by each character’s unique

idiosyncratic behaviors and signature personality traits, as well as by the character’s cultural

grounding.” [39]

Interestingly, to maintain the character’s believability in its cultural adaptation, all the ten

qualities required changes. We will now discuss the cultural implications found by the authors,

related to only two of these qualities (the ones we found more related to our goals):

1. Manner of Gesturing - indicates how the character expresses itself nonverbally. Ges-

2.3. CULTURE IN SYNTHETIC CHARACTERS 15

tures are common in all cultures, and are considered to be a fundamental part of human

dialogue. Still, there are substantial cultural differences related to gestures, such as their

diversity and frequency of use. Furthermore, identical gestures often have different or

even opposite meanings in different cultures. For example, in Bulgaria, nodding one’s

head means ”no”, while shaking it means ”yes”. Likewise, in Japan or Korea, maintain-

ing direct eye contact in a conversation can be insulting, whereas, in the United States,

avoiding it can be a sign of dishonest behaviour or shyness.

2. Emotional Dynamics - encompasses the character’s emotional state, which is subse-

quently expressed in the character’s behaviour. The basic emotions theory, grounded on

primate and cross-cultural studies, indicates that emotions such as fear, anger, sadness,

joy, disgust, and maybe surprise and interest are shared and acknowledged by all humans

[21]. Nevertheless, factors such as the appropriateness, frequency, or length of time an

emotional state lasts, vary across cultures and were taken into account in Kyra’s adap-

tation. For instance, Venezuelan Kyra maintains every emotional charge for the longest

time among the three.

2.3.3 Tactical Language Training System

In the Introduction chapter, we have discussed the advantages of using IVEs as an educational

tool. We will now analyse such a system for intercultural training on communicative skills

that illustrates the strength of these advantages. The Tactical Language Training System

(TLTS) [29, 30] is an IVE developed at the University of Southern California, USA. The goal

is to teach communicative skills in foreign languages that are less commonly taught, such as

Arabic, Chinese or Russian. Learning such languages with traditional courses can be very

time-consuming, due to their unfamiliar writing systems and cultural norms. This can partly

explain why less than 1% of USA college students enrol in Arabic courses [44].

Being presented as a serious game, the TLTS is a very different approach from a traditional

course. It has two main components: a Mission Skill Builder (MSB), and a Mission Practice

Environment (MPE). The first one consists mainly in a set of interactive exercises, in which

learners practice saying common words and phrases into a microphone, which is then auto-

matically analysed for pronunciation errors. A virtual tutor is also present to give immediate

feedback and useful suggestions.


Figure 2.2: Screenshot of the Mission Practice Environment

In the MPE (Figure 2.2), learners test out their communicative skills by assuming the role

of an Army Special Forces unit character and exploring a virtual village, where they must

complete a series of missions. The missions require the player to build rapport among the

natives. These natives are autonomous synthetic characters with their own agendas. They will

only collaborate with the player if they trust him. To gain their trust, the player must speak

correctly to them and use proper cultural gestures. There is also a special aide character that

can help the user by suggesting him what to do. Figure 2.2 exemplifies a nonverbal interaction

where the player is greeting a local with a proper gesture to then ask for the village’s leader

whereabouts (a mission objective).

The first release of the system was called Tactical Iraqi (adapted to the Iraqi Arabic dialect).

An evaluation performed by the U.S. Special Operations Command found that trainees learnt

this type of Arabic to a proficiency level of a novice-high according to the American Council

on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Many users rated the system better and more fun than

other self-study and instructor-led classes. Due to its success, adaptations to other languages

were developed, such as Tactical Pashto and Tactical Dari.

However, regarding our goals, the most relevant aspect of the TLTS is the architecture

that controls the behaviour of the virtual characters. That architecture is called Thespian [54]

and it was built on top of PsychSim [49], a general agent framework capable of generating

2.4. AGENT ARCHITECTURES FOR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL AGENTS 17

social and goal-oriented behaviour (we will review this framework in greater detail in the next

section). Interestingly, the way Thespian embeds cultural norms in the characters’ conduct

is by using social relationships such as trust and liking and then by authoring special social

variables to represent temporary obligations between agents. Obligations are created when

an agent perform a certain action on another agent. To satisfy the obligation the target

agent must choose a proper action in response. Examples of such obligations are: greeting

and greeting back, thanking and saying you are welcome, offering and accepting/rejecting etc.

These obligations somewhat resemble the notion of cultural rituals proposed by Hofstede. By

giving goals to fulfil these obligations, agents will likely follow the encoded cultural norms and

expect other agents (including the user) to follow them as well.

2.4 Agent Architectures for Social and Cultural Agents

Research on agent architectures that include social and cultural factors in their agents’ internal

knowledge and reasoning is quite new. Some of the existent computational models of culture

only study the evolution of culture using simple multi-agent models (like the one proposed

by Axelrod in [3]). However, they do not address the ways culture affects the behaviour of

individuals, which is our main focus.

In the Tactical Language Training System analysis, we’ve seen that the behaviour of the

characters was greatly driven by PsychSim, a architecture for social behaviour. In fact, culture

is fundamentally a social construct. With that in mind, we decided to analyse the characteris-

tics of PsychSim that made it a good choice to extend it with cultural obligations in Thespian.

We will also look to another social model called SGD that explores the notions of social power

and context. Finally, we will examine the CAB model, an agent architecture that mainly aims

to provide a framework where ethnographers can encode explicit cultural norms in the agents’

reasoning and knowledge.

2.4.1 PsychSim

PsychSim [49] is a multi-agent system in which the user is capable of defining a social scenario

to explore how a diverse set of entities (groups or individuals) interact, and to see how those

interactions can be influenced. Each of these entities has the following properties: goals,

preferences, relationships (e.g. friendship, hostility, and authority), private beliefs and mental


models about other entities. The simulation tool generates the behaviour for these entities

and explains the outcome in terms of entity’s preferences and beliefs. The user can introduce

variations on the scenario and specify actions or messages for any entity to perform. Therefore,

PsychSim allows the user to explore multiple tactics for dealing with a social issue and to see

potential consequences of those tactics. School bullying is one particular social issue in which

PsychSim has been tested. Also, as we have said earlier, PsychSim is responsible to drive the

behaviour of the virtual characters in the Tactical Language Learning System.

PhsychSim implements a social theory called Theory of Mind, which is defined in [45] as the

human ability of attributing mental states such as intentions, beliefs, and values, not only to

oneself but to others as well. These mental models of others can greatly affect human behaviour,

and in the absence of accurate information, humans use stereotypes to form these models. In

PsychSim, agents have also a mental model of other agents, representing a subjective view of

the other agent’s goals, beliefs and policies. Moreover, these mental models are initialised with

pre-defined prototypes.

For the bullying scenario, some of the prototypes created correspond to: selfishness, altru-

ism, dominance-seeking. As an example, if Agent A thinks that Agent B is selfish, then Agent

A infers that self-wealth is very important for Agent B. On the other hand, if the Agent B is

perceived as altruistic, then Agent A infers that Agent B has the goal of helping the weak.

Agents are capable of influencing another agent’s beliefs by exchanging messages. When

an agent receives any messages, he considers whether to accept them and make the necessary

change in his beliefs, or to reject them. This decision is based on the following three factors:

• Consistency - the agent evaluate the degree to which a potential belief conforms to

prior observations by asking itself, ”If this belief holds, would it explain the past better

than my current beliefs?” To know the answer, the agent assesses the quality of the

competing explanations by a re-simulation of the past history.

• Self-interest - two sets of beliefs are compared, one in which the message is accepted

and one in which is rejected. The agent will favour the set that will bring him closer to his

goals in the future. The speaker’s self-interest is also evaluated. If the speaker benefits

greatly that the recipient believes in the message sent, then the chances of rejection by

the recipient will increase.

• Bias - corresponds to the level of trust and support that exists between the speaker and


recipient. It serves as a tie-breaker when consistency and self-interest both fail to decide

whether to accept the message or reject it. Trust in another agent is increased/decreased

whenever a message from that agent is accepted/rejected. Similarly, an agent increases

its support level for another agent every time the second agent selects an action that as

a high reward, concerning the first agent’s goals.

PsychSim’s agents are capable of interacting in a social manner by forming a mental model

of other agent’s beliefs and by being able to influence those beliefs. These ideas can prove to

be useful in designing our model.

2.4.2 SGD Model

The Synthetic Group Dynamics Model (SGD Model) [47, 48] is a model designed to characterize

and drive, in a believable way, group interactions in social groups formed with autonomous

agents. Figure 2.3 shows a diagram of the agent’s architecture.

Figure 2.3: SGD Model Agent’s Architecture.

The model focuses on small groups, without a strong organizational structure, that are

committed to the resolution of collaborative tasks. It is based on theories of groups dynam-

ics, developed on human social psychological studies, in particular the ones developed by

Cartwright and Zander [12], Bales [5] and McGrath [41]. The knowledge that agents possess,

in order to implement the SGD Model in their behaviour, is divided into four distinct levels:

• The individual level - defines the individual characteristics of each group member,

such as their abilities and personality. The agent’s abilities determine the actions that


each agent is capable of performing, as well as the corresponding level of expertise that

the agent has in performing each of these actions. The agent’s personality is defined

using two of the dimensions proposed in the Five Factor Model [19]: (1) Extroversion -

represents the dominant initiative of the agent, and influences the agent’s frequency of

interaction; (2) Agreeableness - defines if the agent will favour positive/negative socio-

emotional interactions, depending if the agent has a high/low value in this dimension.

• The group level - defines the group members and their attitude towards the group,

as well as the underlying structure of the group, which is defined in two dimensions:

(1) the structure of power - this dimension emerges from the social influence relations

which determine the power agents have to influence the behaviour of another and (2) the

structure of interpersonal attraction - this dimension emerges from the social attraction

relations (likes/dislikes) that exist between each group member. Each member has a

relative position in the group that indicates his significance in the group. The agents

that have a higher position in the group will usually be the targets of positive socio-

emotional interactions, while the targets of negative socio-emotional interactions will be

the agents with a lower position. This position depends on: the overall social influence

that an agent has on others; the attraction felt by other agents towards him; and his

relative level of expertise. Furthermore, agents also build a relation with the group itself,

having a level of motivation for the group’s interactions and a level of attachment to the

group. Finally, the group has also a unique name to allow the agents to recognize it and

refer to it.

• The interaction level - describes the knowledge that the agents build concerning the

interactions of the group, which occur when agents execute actions that can be perceived

and evaluated by the group’s members. The interactions are responsible for creating

the dynamics in the group and the frequency of them depends on the agent’s motiva-

tion, group position and personality. They can be separated in two main categories: (1)

socio-emotional interactions that are linked to the social relations or (2) instrumental

interactions that are connected to the task the group is trying to complete. Both cate-

gories are classified as positive/negative if they provoke a positive/negative reaction by

the agents. The reactions from the agents are translated to changes in the structures of

the group (instrumental interactions affect the structure of power and socio-emotional


reactions affect the structure of interpersonal attraction).

• The context level - describes the task model and the knowledge about the agent’s envi-

ronment. Additionally, social norms that influence the interpretation (positive/negative)

of the social-emotional interactions may also be defined in the context level. However,

the model does not have any mechanism for the creation of these social norms, so they

have to be defined for each specific context.

The SGD Model provides an interesting way for creating believable group dynamics on

groups of synthetic characters, implemented by autonomous agents. In order to achieve this,

agents build social relations of power and interpersonal attraction with each other. Moreover,

agents have the notion of belonging to a group and are attributed a position in it, according to

their relative importance. The more important agents are the ones with a higher social status

and/or level of expertise. The model also includes a cultural aspect in the behaviour of the

agents by allowing to define social norms and rules in the context level. However, these rules

and norms are equally adopted by all agents and they do not change dynamically.

2.4.3 CAB Model

The Culturally Affected Behaviour (CAB) model [55] is a recent agent model of human be-

haviour that explicitly represents socio-cultural knowledge and reasoning. The aim of the

model is to be able to encode ethnographic data on cultural norms, biases and stereotypes,

which can then be used to drive the behaviour of synthetic characters. The model is grounded

on two social theories: Theory of Mind [45] and the Schema Theory [14].

We have already seen the use and importance of the Theory Of Mind in the PsychSim

system. In CAB, this theory was also necessary, in particular to model explicit cultural stereo-

types and biases. As for modelling cultural norms, the authors were inspired by the Schema

Theory proposed by D’Andrade. This theory postulates that a culture can be represented as a

shared organisation of schemas. Schemas are an old concept, introduced by Kant in [31]. Many

other terms have been used with similar meanings, such as ”frames” in [43] or ”scripts” in [53].

The basic idea is that a schema associates an abstract concept to a collection of knowledge

around it. For instance, the ”writing” schema is associated with someone using an pointed

object that leaves a trace across a surface (the object and the surface are left undetermined).

To describe cultural norms, D’Andrade presents in [13] a type of cognitive schema: the


constitutive rules system. This schema defines a set of rules that are known, shared, and

adhered to by members of a culture. When someone performs an action that is related to any

such rule, the corresponding schema is triggered by the members of the culture.

CAB proposes a way of modelling cultural norms by representing constitutive systems of

rules through socio-cultural networks. Figure illustrates an example of such a network for the

Iraqi Sunni culture.

Figure 2.4: Example of a socio-cultural network in CAB.

The rectangular nodes represent tasks that the agent may perform in the environment and

the rounded nodes represent states that are associated to norms. The intrinsic utility values of

the states here represents the shared importance that the members of the culture place on the

associated norm (the higher the number the more important the norm is). A state can also

have a negative intrinsic utility, meaning that the associated norm has a negative connotation

in the culture. The lines represent the effect a certain task has on a state. Depending on their

sign (+/-), effects determine if the execution of a task reinforces/diminishes the current utility

of the state, by a certain degree. The current utility determines to what extent the norm is

currently being satisfied or not. Also, note the states can refer to the agent’s perspective of

himself or the agent’s perspective of others.

The authors propose that the current utility of the network, called the Socio-Cultural

Satisfaction (SCS), can be used to influence the behaviour of an agent in different ways (the

value is calculated by summing the utility of all the states in the network). For example,

imagine an agent that is a synthetic character in a virtual meeting with a human user. The

2.5. CONCLUDING REMARKS 23

agent can respond more favourably with the user if the SCS has a high value and vice versa.

Also, the agent can prefer plans that does not involve collaboration with the user in the case

of a low SCS. Finally, the character can decide to end the meeting prematurely if the SCS falls

below a certain threshold.

In relation to our work, the CAB model has some similarities. Namely, it is based on

studies from social sciences on real human cultures and also aims to provide an explicit model

of culture to change the behaviour of autonomous synthetic characters. However, the focus of

CAB is to allow a ethnographer the encoding of very specific cultural norms, which are tied to

very specific actions (such as giving alcohol, talking about cars, etc). Instead, our work aims

to provide a more general model of culture that is not focused in such specific norms.

2.5 Concluding Remarks

Our goal is to build an agent architecture that is capable of modelling social groups of agents

that have specifiable cultures, with different ways of behaving associated. However, culture

is a vast concept that is not easy definable, thus we started by reviewing a cultural model:

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions. The main advantages of this model are: it gives a clear and

detailed notion of the differences between national cultures; it is based on a large empirical

survey; and it is relatively easy to use in a computational way.

However, Hofstede’s model focuses exclusively in cultural differences derived from the in-

dividual’s nationality, and it has been criticised by some anthropologists for its accuracy. The

main reason for the majority of these criticisms is that the model assumes that within each

nation there is a uniform national culture, shared by the entire population, and it also assumes

that a small group of IBM’s employees are representative of that culture. Thus, it disregards

the fact that the national cultural characteristics of an individual can be influenced and modi-

fied by their membership in ethnic, religious, and social groups that have their own specialised

cultures. Despite the criticisms, we conclude that the model serves the purposes of our work,

since we want to characterise cultural behaviour and not to replicate national cultures in the

most exact way.

We also reviewed the DMIS model, which offers a way to understand people’s different

predispositions and reactions to cultural differences, by organising them into six different stages

of increasing sensitivity to cultural distinctions. Considering our goal, the model can provide an


approach to evaluate the efficacy and appropriateness, of an Intelligent Virtual Environment,

as an intercultural training tool. However, this evaluation is somewhat subjective, since the

model does not clearly specify how to perform it.

Afterwards, we analysed some computational systems that focus on cultural and social

issues. We started with CUBE-G, Kyra, and TLTS, which are systems where synthetic char-

acters are adapted to different cultures. Then we reviewed PsychSim, the SGD Model, and

the CAB model. These are agent architectures that focus on social and cultural behaviour.

Table 2.2 synthesises the fundamental aspects of all these systems.

System

Cultural

Nonverbal

Behaviour

Cultural

Verbal

Behaviour

Cultural

Goal-

driven

Behaviour

Culture

Parame-

terization

Cultural

Emotional

Behaviour

Social

Relations

and Inter-

actions

Group

Structure

CUBE-G Yes No No Yes No No No

Kyra Yes Yes No No Yes No No

TLTS Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No

PsychSim No No No No No Yes Yes

SGD No No No Yes No Yes Yes

CAB Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No

Table 2.2: Reviewed Systems’ Comparison.

CUBE-G uses Hofstede’s Dimensions to parametrise culture in order to dynamically adapt

the nonverbal behaviour of embodied conversational agents to the user’s cultural background.

The system provides a good insight on how to correlate the cultural dimensions to specific

expressive behaviour. However, the model focuses exclusively on this type of behaviour.

Kyra, on the other hand, was specifically designed for three different cultures: American,

Brazilian, and Venezuelan. Asides from nonverbal behaviour, the authors present nine other

character qualities, where cultural distinctions are present and were taken into consideration

for the character’s believability. Unfortunately, the authors do not provide an easy method to

adapt these qualities to different cultures.

While we think the cultural adaptation of synthetic agents to the user’s culture is a very

challenging topic and CUBE-G and Kyra gives us quite helpful insights into ours goals, the

main objective of our work is not to build a system that adapts to the user’s culture but rather

to achieve an agent architecture that can easily create different cultures whenever used for

different cultural contexts.

The Tactical Language Training System is more related to our purposes, since its synthetic

characters are authored with a specific culture in mind. However, since its main purpose


is language training, it only addresses communicative aspects of a culture, namely spoken

language and gestures. Interestingly, characters have goals to fulfil cultural obligations, a

notion we believe to resemble rituals.

PsychSim, the base architecture used in TLTS creates agents with the Theory of Mind

ability. We believe that this ability is also useful to our work, in particular to model collec-

tivistic cultures, where characters care about the consequences their actions have on other

group members.

Then, we find the SGD Model to be interesting due to its notion of group, and the social

relations of power and interpersonal attraction that exist between the group’s members. As

Hofstede suggests in his cultural model, these types of social relations are greatly affected by

culture. While the model does offer the possibility to define some cultural parameters, this

parametrisation is very limited for our purposes.

Regarding the Culturally Affected Behaviour model, while it is an agent architecture that

has an explicit model of cultural behaviour, the model is mainly focused on the definition of

specific cultural norms. Instead, we wish to explore more general aspects of cultural behaviour

that are not linked to particular tasks or actions, such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Also,

note that CAB’s socio-cultural networks indicate only the agent’s cultural satisfaction level.

The direct consequences this level has on the agent’s behaviour are not formally specified.

Finally, after analysing all these systems, we conclude that they have important features

for our work, but none of them addresses all our needs.


Chapter 3

Conceptual Model

3.1 Introduction

This chapter presents a conceptual model to explicitly model synthetic cultures in groups of

autonomous characters that are driven by an agent architecture. For simplicity reasons, the

term character is used to refer to an agent as well. To explain our conceptual model, we will

define the elements that specify a culture and describe their respective implications on the

behaviours of the characters.

3.2 Culture Specification

The main inspiration for our model comes from Hofstede’s ideas on culture, in particular in

his dimensional model [24] which we have discussed previously. As such, one of its fundamen-

tal principles is that behavioural tendencies are shared by the same characters with the same

culture, and those tendencies are dependent on how the culture is rated on a set of dimensions.

Therefore, we will define the use of these dimensions to create synthetic cultures that share

similar behavioural tendencies to those found in human cultures. Furthermore, aside the cul-

tural dimensions, our model also encompasses two other cultural manifestations identified by

Hofstede: (1) Rituals and (2) Symbols. As stated earlier, Hofstede argues that these mani-

festations are more clearly observable than the ones originated by the dimensions (people are

generally more aware of them). As such, they are included to have a richer model of culture,

but also to compare them against cultural dimensions in the user’s identification of different

cultures.

27

28 CHAPTER 3. CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Hence, a culture c in our model is defined as a 3-tuple 〈D,S,R〉 where:

• D contains the dimensional scores for Hofstede’s dimensions.

• S specifies a set of symbols that have a cultural meaning associated.

• R correspond to the set of rituals that are performed in the culture.

Notice that we will not consider Hofstede’s notion of Heroes, since we do not think it is

fundamental for our problem, besides being a very complex notion to successfully model. Fur-

thermore, we do not explicitly model cultural Values. However, they are still implicitly mod-

elled since the cultural dimensions are directly based on them. For instance, self-independence

is a value related to a high individualism dimension score. As such, the behavioural tendencies

associated to a highly individualistic culture emphasise that value.

3.3 Cultural Dimensions

Hofstede’s model has five different cultural dimensions which normally range from 0 to 100.

Our intention is to use these values to change the agent’s behaviour in a way that is congruent

with Hofstede’s findings. As described in the Related Work chapter, CUBE-G already maps

these dimensions to expressive nonverbal behaviour. We wish to pursue a different approach.

As such, we decided to use the dimensions to influence two other important aspects that are

usually present in an autonomous character: (1) goal utility and (2) emotional appraisal. The

first one is used for a character to make more rational decisions about what he should do at any

given moment. The latter serves to simulate human emotional responses to events, which is

also a fundamental requirement for the believability of the character (e.g. in Kyra, emotional

dynamics are defined as one of the key characteristic qualities to achieve believability). How-

ever, for simplification purposes, we decided to encompass only two of the five dimensions (the

ones that seemed to be more easily recognisable in a short-term interaction): (1) Individualism

vs Collectivism and (2) Power Distance. As such, the other dimensions are left as future work.

3.3.1 Goal Utility

Goal utility is defined as a function that receives a goal and returns a numeric value that

indicates how much that goal is useful for the character (based on his current beliefs). Since

3.3. CULTURAL DIMENSIONS 29

beliefs are always changing on a dynamic environment, it is very likely that a utility of a

certain goal increases or decreases over time. For example, the goal of eating food has a high

utility when the character believes that he is hungry, even higher utility if he believes he is

starving or almost zero utility after he eats a satisfying amount of food. Rational characters

will continuously calculate the utility of every achievable goal and then select to focus on

achieving the goal with the highest utility at the moment.

Impact of Individualism Dimension

So, how can culture affect goal utility? Hofstede states that, in an individualistic culture, ”peo-

ple are expected to be only responsible for themselves and their immediate family.” [24] Also,

close friendships are very important. On the other hand, in a collectivistic culture ”everyone

looks out for one another in exchange for unquestioning loyalty”. As such, it seems clear that

our cultural characters should evaluate a goal’s utility under two different perspectives: (1) the

impact the goal has to themselves and (2) the impact the goal has to others (which requires

the ability to form mental models of others, like the agents from PsychSim). Individualistic

characters are much more concerned with the first perspective as the second one is only im-

portant if the character has a strong interpersonal attraction (symbolising a close bond) with

any of the other characters. Oppositely, collectivistic characters are equally concerned with

both perspectives and treat everyone alike (regardless of social bonds). Hence, we propose the

following equation (3.1) for calculating a goal’s utility based on the individualism score (IDV),

the impact the goal has on the character’s self (SI), the impact the goal has on others (OI),

and a positive relationship factor (PREL), which considers interpersonal attractions between

the targets of the goal and the character:

Utility(g) = SI(g) + OI(g)(100− IDV

100+

IDV

100× PREL(g)) (3.1)

Note that PREL(g) is normalised to a scale of 0 (no positive relationships) to 1 (maximum

positive relationships) and the exact equations for SI(g) and OI(g) are domain-dependent. To

explain the rationale behind this particular equation, the situation depicted in Figure 3.1 will

be used.

In this example, character A is considering the goal of giving some food to character B

versus the goal of giving some food to character C. A has plenty of food so loosing just a

little has a small negative impact, such as SI(g) = -1. However, B is hungry and poor, so


receiving some food would have a considerable positive impact like OI(g) = 5. On the other

hand, C is also hungry but wealthy, so the impact for him of receiving some food is a little

lower, for example OI(g) = 4. Moreover, A has a negative interpersonal attraction towards B,

thus PREL(g) = 0. On the other hand, A has a positive interpersonal attraction towards C,

which makes PREL(g) return a positive multiplier depending on the intensity of the relation

(in this particular scenario, we’ll assume that it returns 0.5).

Figure 3.1: Giving Food Example

Using the previous situation, let’s examine three different cultural scenarios: (1) an extreme

collectivistic culture; (2) an extreme individualistic culture and (3) a neutral culture. In the

first scenario IDV is equal to zero and so equation 3.1 is reduced to:

Utility(g) = SI(g) + OI(g)

In this scenario, both goal impact functions are weighted equally which means that a

character considers his own well-being to have the same importance as the well-being of others,

regardless of the existent relationships. As such, regarding the example depicted, the utility

of giving B food is higher (Utility(g) = 4 ) than giving it to C (Utility(g) = 3 ).

For an extreme individualistic culture (IDV is equal to 100), the equation 3.1 changes to:

Utility(g) = SI(g) + OI(g)× PREL(g)


In this scenario, the others well-being depends only on the existence of a positive relation-

ship. Since in the previous situation A disliked B, then PREL(g) = 0. Thus, A now will never

create an intention to give B food, since the goal has a utility of -1. But for C, since A has a

positive relation with him it makes PREL(g) return a positive multiplier (e.g. 0.5). Thus, the

utility of giving C food will now be equal to 2.

In the third scenario, a neutral culture (one that is neither inclined to individualism or

collectivism), the equation changes to:

Utility(g) = SI(g) + OI(g)× 0.5 + OI(g)× PREL(g)× 0.5

In this culture, the utility for giving B food is equal to 1.5. It is not negative but is lesser

than the utility of giving it to C, which is equal to 2. This means that generally characters of

a neutral culture care for all other agents but will give preference to their friends.

Impact of Power Distance Dimension

According to Hofstede [24], in low-power distance cultures people tend to regard others as

equals despite their formal status. Oppositely, in high power distance cultures powerful people

are expected to be privileged. As such, we want characters that belong to a high power culture

to favour goals that positively affect others who have a higher status. To achieve this result, we

propose to augment equation 3.1 with an additional fraction at the end, based on the power

distance score (PDI), and a power distance factor (DIST) that considers the differences of

power between the targets of the goal and the character:


100+

IDV

100× PREL(g) +

PDI

100×DIST (g)) (3.2)

Similar to the positive relationship factor (PREL), DIST is also normalised to a scale of 0

(power equal or lower than self) to 1 (power is higher than self). Let’s consider again the goal

of character A (power = 5) to give food to character B (power = 3) and the goal of character

A to give food to character C (power = 10). Before, when we looked what would happen in

the extreme collectivistic scenario (IDV = 0), we concluded that A would prefer to give the

food to B (Utility(g) = 4) than to give it to C (Utility(g) = 3).

Now we’ll analyse how the situation changes with the addition of the Power Distance

dimension. Like before, we will examine three different scenarios: (1) extreme low power


distance culture; (2) extreme high-power distance culture and (3) neutral culture. In the

first scenario PDI is equal to zero, which makes the DIST factor irrelevant, thus the previous

situation remains unchanged. In the second scenario, PDI is equal to 100, which reduces

equation (4.3.5) to:

Utility(g) = SI(g) + OI(g) + OI(g)×DIST (g) (3.3)

Since B has lower power than A, DIST(g) is equal to zero and so the goal of giving him

food remains with an utility of 4. Now, C has a power that is two times higher than the power

of A, thus DIST(g) will return a value greater than zero (e.g. DIST(g) = 0.5). Thus, the goal

of giving food to C has now an utility of 5 and so A prefers to give him the food instead of

giving it to B. Finally, in the neutral scenario (PDI = 50), the DIST(g) factor is divided in

half. This reduces the utility of giving C food to 4. Thus, A will not have any preference in

choosing to which agent it should give food, since both goals have the same utility in a neutral

power-distance and extreme collectivistic culture.

3.3.2 Emotional Appraisal

The idea that emotions are elicited by evaluations (appraisals) of events or situations, was first

introduced by Magda Arnold in [2]. Since then, different appraisal theories that attempt to de-

scribe the structure and/or the process of appraisal have been proposed (a detailed description

of several theories can be found in [52]). Even though the theories discord on several aspects,

they are all based on the idea that emotions result from a subjective evaluation of events. This

explains why two different people can show dramatic differences in their emotional response

to the same event.

But how does culture affects emotions? In the literature review, by Batja Mesquita and

Nico Frijda [42], ”cross-cultural differences as well as similarities have been identified in each

phase of the emotional process.” Regarding cultural differences that we can relate to the ap-

praisal process and to Hofstede’s dimensions, there are distinctions related to the Individualism

dimension, proposed by Markus and Kitayama in [40]. They argue that in individualistic cul-

tures the individual ”appears as focused on his or her independence and self-actualization”,

while in a collectivistic culture the individual is ”focused predominantly on his or her rela-

tionship with in-group members or with the in-group as a whole.” Consequently, individualists

appraise events in ”terms of their individual achievements and properties” while collectivists


appraise events in ”terms of group the person belongs to or as affecting the interpersonal re-

lationships.” Note we did not find any distinctions that we could correlate directly to Power

Distance or any other dimension.

Based on the notions previously presented, we propose equation (3.4) for calculating the

praiseworthiness of an event. As stated in the OCC theory of emotions [46] (one of the most

used theories for synthesising emotions in agents), events with a positive praiseworthiness

will potentially cause the character to feel pride if he was responsible for the event, or feel

admiration towards the character that was responsible. On the other hand, a negative praise-

worthiness result will potentially cause the character to feel negative emotions such as shame

or reproach (depending also on who was responsible).

Praiseworthiness(e) =

0, if AI(e) > OI(e) ≥ 0

(OI(e)−AI(e))× 100−IDV100 , if otherwise

(3.4)

The equation we propose is based on the impact the event has on the character who caused

it (AI), the sum of impacts the event has on the other characters (OI), and the individualism

score (IDV). In general terms, the first branch of the equation refers to events that didn’t harm

others (OI(e) ≥ 0) but had a more beneficial effect for the character who caused them (AI(e)

>OI(e)). As such, no matter how collectivistic a culture is, a character will not be ashamed

if, for example, he has just eaten an apple (an event that had a positive effect on himself

but a neutral effect on others). As for the second branch, it provides the following results:

(1) the more collectivistic a culture is (i.e. the lower the IDV), the more an event that is

undesirable for others (OI(e) <0) but is beneficial for the responsible character (AI(e) >0) will

be blameworthy (e.g. stealing something); and also (2) the more collectivistic a culture is, the

more an event that is good for others (OI(e) >0) but is bad for the responsible character (AI(e)

<0) will be highly praiseworthy (e.g. giving food). In other words, collectivistic characters

will find highly admirable a spirit of self-sacrifice for the well-being of the group and will find

highly reproachable selfish acts.

To give an example, consider the following situation: agent B has asked directly agent A

for some food and A denies it. This has a positive impact on A considering he keeps the food

for future use (e.g. AI(e) = 1). However, it has a negative impact on B who is very hungry

(e.g. OI(e) = -3). Let’s consider that agent A and agent B are from a culture that has an IDV


of 27 (the value found for the Portuguese culture). Applying the equation, agent’s A decision

will have a praiseworthiness value of -3 approximately. This means that A will potential feel

ashamed, while B would feel reproach for A. Instead, if A decides to give B food, it will have

a negative impact on A (e.g. AI(e) = -2) but a positive effect on B (e.g. OI(e) = 3). The

praiseworthiness value of this decision will be 3.6. As such, A will likely feel pride, while B will

feel admiration for A. Finally, if we re-examine both decisions, now considering the characters

belong to a culture with an IDV of 91 (the value of the USA culture), we’ll confirm that both

decisions have a very low praiseworthiness. Namely, the decision of giving B food will be equal

to 0.4, while keeping it -0.3.

3.4 Symbols

Hofstede defines symbols as ”gestures, words, pictures or objects that are given a special

meaning by the culture.” [24]. We decided to focus on gestures, as we believe that they are

the most important for our model, specially since they are used frequently in rituals.

As such, symbols are defined as a 2-tuple 〈N, M〉 where:

• N is the name of an physical action.

• M specifies the meaning of the physical action in that culture.

So, the main characteristic for a symbol is that it distinguishes a physical action (e.g.

waving hand) from its meaning (e.g. saying goodbye). Therefore, depending on their culture’s

set of symbols, characters can have different interpretations of the same action or perform the

same intention in different ways. Note that, to avoid ambiguity, the mapping between physical

actions and meanings is a one-to-one relationship, i.e. a particular action has only one meaning

and vice versa. We assume this is a simplification of the real world, where in fact the same

physical action can have different meanings in the same culture due to different contexts (e.g.

a bow can be a form of greeting but also a sign to acknowledge the applause for performing a

play).

Our motivation for focusing on gestures comes also from the fact that, as clearly stated

in [1], gestures are ”definitely NOT a universal language”, and it is frequent that unaware

outsiders can inadvertently offend someone by using the culturally ”wrong” gesture. A famous

example is when former American President George Bush greeted a large crowd of Australians

3.5. RITUALS 35

with the palm of his hand facing him, and his index and middle finger stretched out forming

a ”V”. He assumed he was performing a ”victory” gesture, yet in fact he was insulting the

Australians with a ”screw you” gesture.

As such, we believe gestures to be very important to an IVE that aims to be a successful

intercultural training tool. In fact, in our related work review, we discovered that gestures were

considered as one of the main cultural elements in the Tactical Language Training System [29].

3.5 Rituals

Hofstede defines rituals as essential social activities that are carried out in a predetermined

fashion. Yet, this is not a consensual definition. Since the earliest tribal communities hu-

mans have been involved in ritual activities. According to [7] rituals not only regulate the

relationships between one another in a community but also between people and their natu-

ral resources. In general a ritual can be defined as a set of actions, often thought to have

symbolic value, and its performance is usually prescribed by a religion or by the traditions

of a community. Although this definition seems straightforward, it does not define what kind

of activities make up for a ritual and in some extreme cases [15, 35], every activity can be

seen as a ritual. However, we do not consider this to be an interesting approach to rituals.

According to multiple authors[20, 36, 6, 38, 58], activities can be separated into two classes:

ritual activities and technical activities. Whilst a ritual activity is described as expressive,

rule-governed, routinised, symbolic, or non-instrumental, a technical activity is described as

pragmatic, spontaneous, and instrumentally effective. Therefore, we focus on rituals as a set

of ritual activities.

Another characteristic of rituals (one of the most important) is their invariance [7], in the

sense that a ritual is a repetitive and disciplined set of actions marked as precise and without

much invariance in them. In this perspective, a ritual can be understood as a recipe of activities

that should be executed in a predetermined way. This notion strongly resembles plan recipes

used in traditional BDI architectures [23], the difference being that traditional plans are based

on technical activities (the focus is the end result), whilst rituals are based on ritual activities

(the focus is in the sequence of steps). Thus, looking at how activities are represented in

traditional planning can help us structure a ritual. For instance, Rickel et. al. [51] consider an

activity to consist of ”a set of steps, each of which is either a primitive action or a composite


action. Composite actions give tasks a hierarchical structure” and that ”there may be ordering

constraints among the steps”.

However, a ritual is more than a plan recipe because in addition to specifying how to be

executed, it must also specify when it should become activated and form an intention (similarly

to a goal). Hence, a ritual r is then formally defined as a tuple 〈T, R,C, S, O〉, where:

• T - specifies the type of the ritual. It associates each ritual with a name. Note that it

is necessary to define the type of the ritual because there might be several instantiations

of a given ritual type. For instance, a high-power culture may specify two different (or

even more) greeting rituals, one used between characters with low-status and the other

used by a low-status character to greet a high-status character. Although the actions

involved are different, the rituals performed have the same semantic (greeting someone).

• R - specifies the set of roles of participants involved in the ritual.

• C - represents the rituals’ context of activation, and it is composed by a set of conditions

that need to be verified in order for the ritual to be performed. These conditions must

also indicate the characters that may fit each of the specified roles.

• S - corresponds to the set of steps of the ritual, where a step is a pair 〈role, action〉. A

ritual usually involves the actions of other characters, thus it is necessary to define who

should perform each of the rituals’ actions.

• O - is the set of ordering constraints (if any) between the steps of the ritual. An order

constraint S1 ≺ S2 specifies that step S1 should be executed before step S2 starts.

To see how this definition can be applied, let’s consider an example on how to define a very

informal ritual of greeting someone:

• T - Greeting-Ritual.

• R - {Greet-Initiator, Greet-Replier}

• C - {c1,c2}, where c1 verifies if the character with the first role has just seen the character

that has the second role and c2 verifies if both characters have the same status.

• S - {<Greet-Initiator,Informal-Greet-Gesture>, <Greet-Replier,Informal-Greet-Gesture>}


• O - {} There is no need for order constraints, since it does not matter which character

performs the first action.

To exemplify the addition of a formal greeting ritual to the same culture, we can define

another ritual with the same type as the previous one:

• T - Greeting-Ritual.

• R - {High-Power, Low-Power}

• C - {c1,c2}, where c1 verifies if the character with the first role has just seen the character

that has the second role and c2 verifies if the High-Power character has a higher status

than the Low-Power character.

• S - {<High-Power,Formal-Greet-Gesture>, <Low-Power,Respectful-Greet-Gesture-Reply>}

• O - {<High-Power,Formal-Greet-Gesture>≺< Low-Power,Respectful-Greet-Gesture-Reply>}

This constraint obliges the Low-Power character to wait first for the greeting gesture of

the High-Power character.


In this chapter, we have presented a model to specify and create different cultures of au-

tonomous synthetic characters. Inspired by anthropological studies on human cultural vari-

ation, we proposed a definition of culture that encompasses three important elements: (1)

Cultural Dimensions, (2) Symbols and (3) Rituals.

Cultural Dimensions influence the behaviour of the characters by affecting their emotions

and the utility of their goals. Symbols are represented by physical actions that have a special

meaning only to the members of that culture. Finally, a ritual was defined as a well determined

sequence of actions, performed by specific roles when a specific context is verified.


Chapter 4

Implementation

4.1 Introduction

This chapter describes an implementation of the conceptual model previously presented. The

implementation was done by extending an already existent autonomous agent architecture,

FAtiMA-PSI [17, 18, 37]. As such, we will start by presenting an summary of this particular

architecture also explaining why it was a good starting point for our work. We then present the

architecture that resulted from integrating our conceptual model. Finally, the implementation

of each cultural component is carefully described.

4.2 FAtiMA-PSI (Baseline Architecture)

FAtiMA-PSI (see Figure 4.1) is an agent architecture, written with the Java programming lan-

guage, which aims to create synthetic characters that are autonomous, engaging and believable.

In order to achieve this, emotions, needs, and personality take a central role in influencing be-

haviour. The concept of emotions is based on the OCC cognitive theory of emotions [12],

which defines emotions as valenced (good or bad) reactions to events. The individual evalua-

tion of events that causes such reactions is called the appraisal process. Characters’ needs are

grounded on a psychological model of human action regulation called PSI [19]. This theory

proposes five different human needs, that motivate human behaviour:

• Energy - the need to consume resources (water and food) in order to live.

• Integrity - the need to maintain one’s well being, avoiding pain.

39

40 CHAPTER 4. IMPLEMENTATION

• Affiliation - the need to be accepted by others and become part of social groups. It might

explain why humans perform rituals and abide by social values.

• Certainty - represents the need of being able to make good predictions about the envi-

ronment as well as the consequence our actions have in it.

• Competence - is the need of being able to solve problems and finish tasks with success.

As for personality, the architecture does not follow any specific theoretical model. Instead,

it allows to manually define different roles that are then associated to characters. The idea is

that these roles are perceived by the users as different personalities. Their authoring involves

defining the following characteristics: (1) Emotional Thresholds - how hard it is for a character

to feel a given emotion; (2) Emotional Decay Rates - how long does a character feels an emotion;

(3) Goals - the personal goals of the character; (4) Emotional Reaction Rules - how does the

character evaluates events; (5) Action Tendencies - reactive actions that are triggered by a

certain emotion (e.g. crying when feeling distress); and (6) Need Weights - the importance

each need has for the character.

Figure 4.1: FAtiMA-PSI Agent Architecture

4.2. FATIMA-PSI (BASELINE ARCHITECTURE) 41

The architecture, in general terms, works in the following way. Events that happen in the

environment are perceived by the agents’ sensors. Whenever a new event is perceived, the

following happens:

• The motivational state is changed according to the action’s impact on the character’s

needs (e.g. the eat action lowers the energy need). When an event lowers/raises the

agent’s needs, it is evaluated as desirable/undesirable for that agent. Moreover, the more

a certain need is low/high, the more higher/lower the utility of a goal that contributes

positively for that need is.

• The Autobiographic Memory and the Knowledge Base are updated. These are the ar-

chitecture’s main memory components. The first stores events and associated emotional

states while the second is responsible for storing semantic knowledge such as properties

about the world and relations between the characters.

• The reactive layer and deliberative layer appraises the event and generate a set of emo-

tions that alter’s the character’s emotional state. The deliberative appraisal elicits emo-

tions that are associated to the relation between the event and the agent’s goals. For

example, after a character completes a goal, he likely feels Satisfaction. On the other

hand, the reactive appraisal elicits all other types of emotions, based on how the event

affected the motivational state and also on manually defined emotional reaction rules,

which specify the desirability for other characters and the praiseworthiness of an event.

In both appraisals, the mood of the character and his emotional thresholds are also

considered. The resultant emotional state can possibly trigger action tendencies (quick

emotional reactions). These reactions are performed in the virtual world through the

agents’ effectors.

• New events trigger the goal selection process. This process starts by checking which

goals have become active (the ones that have all their preconditions satisfied). Then

for each active goal, if its expected utility surpasses a predefined minimum value, a new

intention to achieve the goal is created and added to the intention structure. Afterwards,

a continuous partial order planner, tries to build a plan for the intention with the highest

utility (the one associated to the goal that is expected to contribute the most for the

character’s needs). After a feasible plan is built, the planner executes it by sending the


actions to the effectors. Since the virtual world is a dynamic environment, the planner

is always monitoring the events that happen in the virtual world, to check if the current

plan needs to be changed or even dropped.

FAtiMA-PSI was chosen for the implementation of our cultural model, primarily because

it was specifically designed for the creation of agents that are autonomous synthetic characters

and resemble humans in the ways that they behave and interact with each other (agents have

emotions, quick reactions to events, goals, social relations, memory and needs). Moreover, the

architecture has the following processes that are necessary to implement our model: (1) goal

selection based on a goal utility function; (2) emotional appraisal; and (3) planning capabilities.

Finally, designing a new agent architecture from scratch would be too much time-consuming

and it is not the focus of our work.

4.3 Cultural Architecture

The integration of the cultural conceptual model into FAtiMA-PSI resulted in the architecture

depicted in Figure 4.2:

Figure 4.2: Cultural Agent Architecture

4.3. CULTURAL ARCHITECTURE 43

The new modules that resulted from this integration are: (1) Symbol Translator ; (2);

Motivational State of Others; (3) Cultural Appraisal ; (4) Cultural Goal Selection; and (5)

Ritual Manager. There is also a cultural parametrisation of Symbols, Dimensions and Rituals.

This parametrisation is done in a XML file that is associated to all the characters we wish to

belong to a specific culture. In the following sections we will discuss how each of the added

modules work as well as the details of the cultural parametrisation.

4.3.1 Symbols Parametrisation

Every symbol requires the manual definition of the parameters shown in Table 4.1.

Parameter Description

Name A string with the name of a physical action

Meaning A string with the meaning of the physical action

Table 4.1: Symbol parameters

The following XML code exemplifies the definition of two symbols:

<Symbol name="bow" meaning="respect-greeting-gesture"/>

<Symbol name="wave-hand" meaning="casual-greeting-gesture"/>

4.3.2 Symbol Translator

The Symbol Translator handles the specified symbols. Whenever an event is perceived by

the sensors, the module checks if the event’s action is associated with some symbol. If an

association is found, it simply changes the event by replacing the action name with its cultural

meaning. If no association is found, the event remains unchanged. To give an example, consider

the following event: agent A performs a bow to agent B. If in the culture file associated to

agent B the following symbol exists:


Then agent B will re-interpret the event as: agent A performs a respectful greeting gesture

to agent B. If no such symbol is found, the event is not re-interpreted. Also, whenever the

character wants to perform an intention that corresponds to a symbol’s meaning, the Symbol


Translator translates the intention to the associated physical action and sends it to the agent’s

effectors. For instance, if agent B intends to reply by performing also a respectful greeting

gesture to agent A, the symbol translator will translate this intention into it’s corresponding

action, causing the agent’s effectors to send a ”bow” action.

To optimise the translation process, while sacrificing some storage space, symbols are stored

simultaneously in two different hash tables: one that is indexed by the name of the physical

action and another that is indexed by the name of the symbol’s meaning. This was possible

due to the fact that we assume a one-to-one relationship between actions and meanings.

4.3.3 Motivational State of Others

When an agent is created, his own Motivational State is initialised. The initial intensity and

their relative weights are predefined in the character’s role file. This intensity can range from

0 to 10 (with the value 10 meaning that the need is entirely fulfilled and 0 meaning the need

is entirely unfulfilled). When an event happens, the associated action can have a predefined

effect that is used to update the motivational state. For example, if agent A eats an apple (an

action with a defined effect of 2 in the energy drive), he fulfills his energy level by 2 multiplied

by the weight (ranges from 0 to 1) the agent has for the energy need. Note that needs also

decay naturally with time.

In the new cultural architecture, agents are capable of reasoning not only about their

own needs, but also of other agents’ needs as well. To achieve this, every time an agent

encounters another agent he creates a mental representation of that agent’s motivational sate.

This representation is initiated with a neutral intensity for each drive (i.e. intensity = 5). This

default assumption is made since there is no evidence to decide if the other character has his

needs fulfilled or not. When other agents participate on events, the representation of their

motivational states is updated according to the event’s predefined effects on the affiliation,

integrity and energy needs (the other needs are only related to their own personal goals, which

are unknown to the agent).

Figure 4.3 was taken after running a small simulation where agent B meets and greets agent

A (an action that has a positive effect on A’s affiliation). The figure displays the resultant

data structures for their motivational states at the end. We can see that their perspectives

of each others’ motivational states are different from the real values. For example, agent B

thinks that agent A has his affiliation need at 7.7 while, in reality, agent A has only 5.7. This


Figure 4.3: Motivational States of Two Different Agents

happened because, before the greeting, agent B assumed A’s affiliation was at 5, not knowing

that in fact, A’s affiliation was much lower.

As we will describe later in this chapter, these mental representations of other agent’s

motivational states are fundamental for the Cultural Appraisal and Cultural Goal Selection

modules.

4.3.4 Dimensions Parametrisation

The parametrisation of the cultural dimensions is very simple, as described in Table 4.2. To

give an example, an extreme individualistic and high power distance culture is defined in the

culture XML file with the following code:

<CulturalDimension name="PowerDistance" value="100"/>

<CulturalDimension name="Individualism" value="100"/>


Parameter Range Description

Name{Individualism, Pow-

erDistance}The name of the dimension.

Value [0..100] The value associated to the dimension

Table 4.2: Cultural dimensions parameters

4.3.5 Cultural Goal Selection

To better explain how the Culture Goal Selection module works, we will start by describing

how goals are defined and treated in the architecture.

Goal Definition

All goals are predefined in an XML file, conventionally named Goal-Library. A goal can then be

associated to a single character, by including a reference in that character’s role file. However,

it can also be associated to every character of a given culture, by including a reference in that

culture’s XML file. To define a goal, one must author the following attributes:

• Id - the goal identifier or name.

• Preconditions - a list of conditions that determine when the goal becomes active.

• SuccessConditions - a list of conditions used to determine if the goal is successful.

• FailureConditions - a list of conditions that determine the goal failure.

• ExpectedEffects - specifies the expected effects the goal will have in the agents’ needs.

The Id is used to uniquely identify each instance of the goal, and it is useful to detect if a

given goal is already active or to search in the Autobiographic Memory for past activations. The

preconditions are used for the activation process; a goal becomes active if all the preconditions

of the goal are verified.SuccessConditions represent the state of the world that the goal aims to

achieve. Failure conditions represent an automatic goal failure mechanism. If at any time the

failure conditions are verified, the goal is assumed to fail and is removed from the deliberative


layer. The attribute ExpectedEffects, as we will see, is used in determining the goal’s expected

utility.

The following XML code is an example of a simple goal definition:

<ActivePursuitGoal name="OfferHelpToPaintNewHouse([target])">

<PreConditions>

<RecentEvent occurred="True" subject="[target]" action="SpeechAct" target="[SELF]"

parameters="ask-for-help-to-paint-new-house" />

</PreConditions>

<SucessConditions>

<RecentEvent occurred="True" subject="[SELF]" action="SpeechAct" target="[target]"

parameters="offer-help-to-paint-new-house" />

</SucessConditions>

<ExpectedEffects>

<OnSelect drive="Energy" target="[SELF]" value="-1"/>

<OnSelect drive="Affiliation" target="[target]" value="+3"/>

</ExpectedEffects>

</ActivePursuitGoal>

This goal is activated when another agent asks for help to paint his new house. The goal

is achieved just by saying that help will be given. The predefined expected effects of this goal

are a decrease on the agent’s energy level and an increase on the affiliation level of the agent

who asked for help. It’s important to note that this particular goal in the baseline architecture

would never be selected since there is no benefit for the agent who achieves it. However, with

the new cultural architecture, we will see that it can now become selected, depending on the

cultural dimensions parametrisation.

Goal Selection

The Cultural Goal Selection module starts by checking which goals associated to the character

have become active. Then, for each active goal it calculates their expected utility. The goal

with the highest utility at the moment is selected. If the utility of the goal selected is high

enough, the agent commits himself to the intention of achieving that goal. To calculate the

utility of each goal, the module uses the following equation:


100+

IDV

100× PREL(g) +

PDI

100×DIST (g))


The rationale of this equation was already discussed in the Conceptual Model chapter. To

implement it, the following associations were made:

• SI(g) corresponds to the sum of the expected effects the goal g has on the character’s

current motivational state. Each expected effected is multiplied by an urgency factor.

This factor is inversely proportional to the need’s current intensity level. In the previous

goal example, assuming the urgency factor is equal to 1, then SI(g) = -1.

• OI(g) is the sum of the expected effects the goal g has on the goal’s target (determined

using the representation of that agent’s motivational state). It also uses the same urgency

factor. In the previous goal example, assuming the urgency factor of the target agent is

equal to 1, then OI(g) = 3.

• IDV corresponds directly to the individualism dimensional score, specified in the culture’s

XML file.

• PDI corresponds directly to the power distance index value, specified in the culture’s

XML file.

• PREL(g) is determined by searching in the Knowledge Base for a positive Like relation-

ship between the character and the target of the goal g; its value is normalised to a scale

of 0 (neutral relationship) to 1 (strongest relationship). Note that the Like relationships

are predefined in each character’s role file.

• DIST(g) is determined by subtracting the [self ](power) property from the [target](power)

property (after searching them in the Knowledge Base). If the result is positive, then

DIST(g) is normalised to a scale of 0 (no difference) to 1 (highest difference). If the

result is negative (means the target has a lower power), DIST(g) is equal to 0. Note that

the power properties for each character are also manually specified.

Using this equation, the previous goal of offering help to paint a house will likely have a

high utility if: (1) the agents are in a highly collectivistic culture (low IDV), or (2) if they are

in an individualistic culture (high IDV) and the agent has a strong relationship with the agent

who asks for help (high PREL), or (3) if the agent who asked for help has a higher status (high

DIST) and they are from a high-power distance culture (high PDI).


4.3.6 Cultural Appraisal

The Cultural Appraisal module is triggered by the perception of an event. It starts by deter-

mining the following appraisal variables:

• Desirability - represents how much the agent found the event desirable for himself. It is

equal to the impact the event had on the agent’s motivational state.

• DesirabilityForOther - represents how much the agent found the event desirable for the

other agents. It is equal to the perceived impact the event had on the other agents’

motivational states.

• Like - represent how much the agent likes/dislikes another agent or object. It is only

used when the agent perceives a new agent or a new object.

• Praiseworthiness - represents how the agent evaluates the event according to his cultural

values. This is determined by using the same equation we presented in the Conceptual

Model chapter.

Praiseworthiness(e) =

0, if AI(e) > OI(e) ≥ 0

(OI(e)−AI(e))× 100−IDV100 , if otherwise

OI(e) is equal to the impact the event had on the motivational state of the other agents

that were affected by the event. AI(E) is equal to the impact the event had on the

motivational state of the agent responsible for the event, IDV is equal to the individualism

dimensional score, specified in the culture’s XML file.

The values of these variables are used to determine a set of potential emotions and their

base intensities. For example, if an agent caused an event that had a Praiseworthiness of 3

then a new potential Pride emotion is created with a base intensity of 3 as well. Afterwards,

the agent’s current mood and arousal are applied to the base intensity to determine the final

emotion’s intensity. If the final intensity surpasses the agent’s defined emotional threshold for

that emotion, then it is added to the agent’s emotional state.

Note that the Cultural Appraisal module is an extension of the Reactive Appraisal of the

baseline architecture (described in greater detail in [16]). The main difference in the new

architecture is that it is capable of automatically calculating the praiseworthiness of every


event. In the baseline architecture, the Praiseworthiness value of each event had to be manually

specified in the character’s role file, in the form of emotional reaction rules. Still, in the new

architecture, the author can continue to define these rules in order to capture very particular

events that are also blameworthy/praiseworthy in the agents’ culture. For example, to define

as blameworthy the event of singing while eating at a dinner table.

4.3.7 Rituals Parametrisation

In the Conceptual Model chapter, we have said that a ritual is more than a plan recipe since in

addition to specifying how to be executed, it must also specify when it should become activated

and form an intention (similar to a goal). As such, the parametrisation of rituals (see table

4.3) has also some of the attributes found in goals.

Parameter Description

Name String with the ritual’s type identifier.

PreconditionsA list of general conditions that need to be verified in order to activate

the ritual.

ContextA list of conditions associated to the location, time and social rela-

tions that are also verified for the ritual’s activation.

Roles

A list of generic roles that are involved in the ritual. The ritual’s

preconditions and context dictate which character may fit a given

role.

StepsThe list of actions that have to be executed to finish the ritual. Every

action has an associated role that determines who should perform it.

Ordering Con-

straints

A set of links that specify the order in which the actions must be

performed through a set of links. A link simply indicates that a

particular step must be executed before another particular step.

Expected Ef-

fects

A list of effects the ritual will possibly have in the agent’s needs in

case the ritual succeeds

Table 4.3: Ritual parameters


The following XML code exemplifies a possible definition of a greeting ritual:

<Ritual name="GreetingRitual">

<Roles>

<Role name="[init]"/> <Role name="[replier]"/>

</Roles>

<PreConditions>

<RecentEvent occurred="True" subject="[init]" action="look-at"

target="[replier]"/>

<Property name="[replier]" operator="!=" value="[init]"/>

</PreConditions>

<Context>

<Social name="power" target="[init]" operator="=" value="[replier]"/>

</Context>

<Steps>

<Step role="[init]" name="casual-greeting-gesture([replier])"/>

<Step role="[replier]" name="casual-greeting-gesture([init])"/>

</Steps>

<OrderingConstraints>

</OrderingConstraints>

<ExpectedEffects>

<OnSelect drive="Affiliation" target="[SELF]" value="+3"/>

<OnIgnore drive="Affiliation" target="[SELF]" value="-3"/>

</ExpectedEffects>

</Ritual>

The ritual previously defined involves two characters, one that fits the init role, and the

other the replier role. The first precondition specifies that the ritual can be only activated if the

character who has the init role has looked at the replier. The second precondition states that

the same character can not fit both roles simultaneously. Afterwards, the context condition

indicates that the characters must have the same power. The ritual has a single step associated

to each role that involves the same action, casual-greeting-gesture. Since there are no ordering

constraints, it does not matter the sequence by which the actions are executed. Finally, the

expected effect for executing this ritual is a positive contribution to the affiliation need, while

ignoring it (choosing another ritual/goal instead), is expected to have a negative contribution.


Note that since the previous ritual only applies to characters that have the same power,

the architecture allows to define also a greeting ritual for characters of different power. This

new ritual can be very similar to the first (sharing the same type), changing just the context

condition to:

<Social name="power" target="[replier]" operator="LesserThan" value="[init]"/>

Naturally, since it is a different ritual it makes sense to also change the steps and ordering

constraints. A possible modification could be:

<Steps>

<Step role="[init]" name="casual-greeting-gesture([replier])"/>

<Step role="[replier]" name="respect-greeting-gesture([init])"/>

</Steps>

<OrderingConstraints>

<Link before="0" after="1"/>

</OrderingConstraints>

Hence, according to the new ritual, when a character greets another that has a higher

power he will have to wait for that character to first perform a casual-greeting-gesture so he

can then reply with a respect-greeting-gesture.

Differences from Goals

Unlike regular goals, a ritual does not need to define the success conditions and failure con-

ditions since they are implicitly defined. A ritual succeeds, according to a character’s point

of view, if all the ritual’s actions are perceived as successfully executed and fails otherwise.

There are another two important characteristics of rituals when comparing them with goals.

The first one is that the knowledge of the ritual is shared amongst all members of a given

culture, meaning that all agents will know about and have the same rituals. Contrarily, goals

are usually individual and the agents do not know what are the other ones’ goals. Secondly,

rituals with the same participants are considered equivalent if the roles are equivalent. As an

example, consider the previously defined greeting ritual, between character A and character

B, when (Power(A) = Power(B). The ritual of A greeting B is equivalent to B greeting A

since there is no distinction in the roles they take in the ritual (i.e both A and B can have the

init and replier role. Remember that from their individual perspectives, both A and B have


the same greeting ritual, and it may happen that A activates the ritual of greeting B (with A

assuming the init role) at the same time B activates the ritual of greeting A (with B assuming

the init role). By testing if a equivalent ritual exists before activating it, we can prevent agents

A and B from greeting each other twice.

4.3.8 Ritual Manager

This module is responsible for the ritual’s activation. A ritual can be activated by two distinct

processes: Pro-Active Activation and Reactive Activation. As for the the ritual’s execution, it

is done using the architecture’s Planner.

Pro-Active Activation

This pro-active activation is the main process of ritual’s activation, which is similar to the

goal’s activation process. When an event is perceived, the deliberative layer will check all

Rituals’ context conditions and normal preconditions to determine if they can become active.

This process also specifies who will be the possible participants of the ritual by looking at the

context’s conditions. If the context’s conditions are not enough to specify all the roles of the

ritual, it will not be possible to instantiate the ritual and thus it will never be activated.

However, even if the conditions are not enough, the deliberative layer will be responsible

for searching in the agent’s Knowledge Base (or in other knowledge components), in order

to find a set of substitutions that will make the conditions valid. If such sets are found, the

activation process will create different instantiations for each of the possible substitutions.

As a very simple example, imagine a Greeting ritual with two roles, [initiator] and [replier],

and with two conditions [initiator](type) = character and [replier](type) = character. The

activation process will check the Knowledge Base searching for entities that have a property

type with the value character, and will then create distinct ritual instantiations for each of the

valid combinations. Supposing that the agent knows two entities that satisfy such property, A

and B, he will create four active instantiations: Greeting(A,A), Greeting(A,B), Greeting(B,B),

Greeting(B,A). Obviously, the ritual must specify more conditions such as the initiator being

different from the replier, the greeting only happening when the initiator sees the replier, etc.


Reactive Activation

The second type of activation is the reactive activation. Although the pro-active activation

process handles most of ritual activations, there are some situations where it cannot activate

a ritual when it should. This happens for instance when someone else started the ritual before

the agent could activate it’s own ritual (or started it with a different role allocation). To

illustrate the situation, we can consider the above situation where agent A decided to take the

initiative to greet B but B was faster and took the initiative. Instead of continuing with the

original ritual, it should detect that he just need to continue the ritual started by B.

In order to handle these situations, a reactive process of ritual activation was integrated

in the architecture. When the agent perceives an action performed by another agent, it will

compare the action against all the rituals he knows. If the action belongs to a ritual, he will

then check the ritual’s preconditions to see if the ritual is valid in that situation. Finally if the

ritual is valid, the agent will also verify if he has an active role in the ritual or not. If he does

not has any role, there is no need to activate the ritual since he will not do anything anyway.

If, on the contrary, the agent has a possible role on the ritual, he will activate the ritual and

the ritual will then be executed as a regular ritual. This is similar to what humans do when

they recognize a ritual they know and that they should follow.

Execution

Once a ritual becomes active, the architecture’s Planner will pick up the predefined plan and

adjust it to the current state of the world (and may even add missing actions if the ritual is

incomplete). This means that the planner will remove actions of the ritual that were already

executed and will check if there are any preconditions necessary for the execution of the steps

(and not verified at the moment). If there are, the planner will try to add actions that achieve

the necessary preconditions. For instance, imagine that in order to perform a ritual action of

bowing to someone, the agent would need to move near that character. The planner would

detect such precondition and add the corresponding move action to the plan.

After this initial processing step, the planner will then start to execute the ritual if the plan

is valid, or will fail if there is no possible way to execute the plan. When selecting an action

for execution, the planner will always give preference to actions that must be executed by the

agent (this is important to prevent some types of deadlock). If such actions are available, and


there is no ordering constraint that prevents them from being selected, the agent will send one

of them for execution. The agent will then monitor the execution of the action, and will select

the next action once the last one finishes. If the only available actions correspond to actions of

other agents, the agent will wait a predefined amount of time for the other agent to act. If after

some time, the other agent performs as expected the agent will update the ritual accordingly

and move to the next action. On the contrary, if time goes by and nothing happens, the agent

will lower its expectations about the ritual, and may eventually give up.


The purpose of this chapter was to describe how our cultural conceptual model was integrated

into an agent architecture called FAtiMA-PSI. We have started by describing the main features

of this particular architecture and explaining why it was a good starting point for our work.

Afterwards, the extended architecture for culture-specific characters was presented. It embeds

the characters with a predisposition to prefer certain goals and feel certain emotions according

to their culture. The main idea for achieving this was to make characters more or less con-

cerned with the needs of others, according to the values defined for their culture’s dimensions.

Moreover, this required characters to form their own mental models of others’ motivational

states. Additionally, we developed a symbol translator component that captures specificities

of cultural communication by using a simple parametrisation of symbols. Finally, the archi-

tecture allows characters to perform rituals that are associated to their culture. These rituals

were implemented in a similar manner to how goals are implemented, yet with significant dif-

ferences, such as having an already predefined plan associated. Also, the ritual’s activation

and execution processes were carefully described.


Chapter 5

Case Studies

5.1 Introduction

This chapter describes two case studies that were developed to evaluate the architecture’s

capability of creating different synthetic cultures. The first case study consists in a serious

game called ORIENT where users interact with a group of Sprytes, a fictional culture of

synthetic characters driven by our architecture. The second case study consists in a short

emergent story - a dinner party - with four different cultural scenarios. The story is acted

by a small group of characters, which interact with each other in a virtual world where the

user is an invisible observer. In this chapter, we will explain the common elements of the four

scenarios, as well as their differences.

5.2 First Case Study - ORIENT Game

The implemented cultural architecture was used for the development of a serious game called

ORIENT: Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology. The game is

an agent-based educational role-play, developed in the context of an EU-funded project called

eCIRCUS. The main purpose of ORIENT is to promote inter-cultural empathy for young

teenagers. With that in mind, the progressive challenges the players must confront during the

game were designed based on Bennet’s developmental model of intercultural sensitivity [8] (a

model analysed in the Related Work chapter).

57

58 CHAPTER 5. CASE STUDIES

Figure 5.1: Screenshot of ORIENT.

In ORIENT (see Figure 5.1), players (assuming the role of space travellers), must interact

with Sprytes, an unfamiliar fictional foreign culture whose planet is about to be destroyed by a

large meteor. The main objective for the players is to gain the trust of the Sprytes to then save

them from annihilation. To gain their trust, players have to become familiar with the Sprytes

strange customs and gestures. For instance, they must understand that Sprytes’s culture is

strongly hierarchical and everyone is highly compassionate and loyal to each other. In order

to create this culturally specific behaviour, we applied our architecture to define the Spryte’s

gestures and rituals. Moreover, their culture was parametrised as highly collectivistic and with

a high power distance score.

ORIENT also has an innovative approach in terms of user interaction. Instead of only

one user interacting with a gamepad or a keyboard and mouse, ORIENT allows three users

to interact simultaneously, each one controlling one of the following devices: a Dance Mat, a

mobile phone and a WiiMote. Each device has a different but essential function: (1) the Dance

Mat is used for navigation purposes; (2) the mobile phone is used for verbal communication

and object recognition; and finally (3) the WiiMote is used to perform important cultural

gestures that are used for instance, in the greeting rituals of the culture.

The rationale for allowing a group of users to interact simultaneously was to promote

social collaboration. A second objective was to encourage discussion between players about

the cultural differences found in the synthetic culture. Also, the intention of using novel

5.3. SECOND CASE STUDY - DINNER PARTY 59

interaction devices was to incite players’ curiosity to play the game and to provide a more

engaging experience.

After conducting two pilot studies, users did found the Sprytes to be a very different culture

from their own and most users were interested in the storyline. However, even tough ORIENT

seems to be a promising project, it currently has only a single culture. Hence, we cannot use

it to measure the power of our architecture in creating distinct cultures. For that reason, we

developed another case study, with a small group of characters configured with different cultural

parametrisations. This second case study was the one used for our evaluation. Therefore it

will be described in greater detail in the following sections.

5.3 Second Case Study - Dinner Party

The design process for the second case study involved the choice of a simple and common

real-life situation that had significant cultural variation. The idea was to use our architecture

to create different cultural groups of autonomous characters to perform that situation in the

virtual world. Also, asides from a different cultural parametrisation, the scenarios would have

exactly the same configuration.

Our final decision was to have five different characters acting a simple dinner party together.

We have chosen this situation because cultures throughout the world have very different eating

rituals [59]. Therefore, it seemed a good situation to portray cultural differences with our

system. Also, for the connection between the agent’s architecture and the 3D virtual world,

we decided to reuse the same platform that was used in the ORIENT game [4].

For simplicity reasons, the overall plot is very short: the characters arrive at the party

location; greet each other; socialise for a while; and then sit together at a dinner table and

start to eat. Note that, even though the story follows a plot, it is not explicitly scripted. What

happens is that the story emerges from the characters’ autonomous decisions, which are based

on their goals, emotions, motivational needs, and culture. As authors of the story, we only

defined: (1) properties of the characters/environment; (2) the set of possible goals/behaviours

the characters might decide upon; and (3) a list of simple Narrative Actions such as inserting

a character in the environment at a given time (these actions are performed by a special entity

of the world platform, called Story Facilitator [22]). Before we dwell on the differences of the

scenarios, we will first describe the characters in more detail.


5.3.1 Character Design

Figure 5.2: Characters at the dinner table

All the scenarios have the same five different characters. Figure 5.2 shows all of them having

dinner. Noticeably, they all have the same appearance and are dressed with the same peculiar

outfit (just with different colours). The main reason for designing the characters in this manner,

was so that users could not associate the characters’ appearance to any particular known

culture. In our opinion, that would very likely lead the users to create cultural expectations

that would not be related to our cultural model.

Despite the fact that the characters all look alike, they have some individual differences.

Namely, two of them have a low social status (the ones dressed in red); another two have a

medium status (the ones with the blue clothes) and the last one has a high status (the elder of

the group, dressed in violet). Moreover, there is one character that feels sick and another that

has some medicine with him. Also, the character that has the medicine has just built a new

house and needs someone to help him paint it. This character also likes to tell ”lame” jokes

to everyone. In addition, there is one character that has a small gift to offer to the host of the

party, yet the host character dislikes small gifts. Finally, they all start the interaction with a

neutral Like relationship between each other.

All of these individual differences correspond to different properties that are stored in the


Knowledge Base of all the characters. They were used as preconditions to activate certain goals

or rituals. As we will describe in the next section, the different social statuses were mainly used

for the specification of rituals, while the other differences were made for originating situations

to explore the parametrisation of the culture’s dimensional scores. Also, we considered that

giving some individuality to the characters was important for creating richer scenarios.

5.3.2 Culture Design

The choice of the different cultural scenarios, was based on the notion of synthetic cultures that

was mentioned in the Related Work chapter. They represent extreme manifestations of the

cultural dimensional values, and so they stress the occurrence of the associated behavioural

tendencies. This makes the cultural differences more likely to be recognised, which is very

important for our objective.

Hence, we’ve defined the following four different cultures, based on the extremes of the two

dimensions implemented:

Culture 1 - Extremely High Power Distance with Extreme Individualism:



Culture 2 - Extremely High Power Distance with Extreme Collectivism:



Culture 3 - Extremely Low Power Distance with Extreme Individualism:



Culture 4 - Extremely Low Power Distance with Extreme Collectivism:




In addition to this parametrisation, the four different cultures share a set of common goals,

yet have different rituals and symbols associated. We will now discuss the specification of these

elements in more detail.

5.3.3 Goals

Like described earlier, the dimensional values will have a significant effect on the goal selection

process. As such, 16 different goals were defined for this particular dinner party scenario. Note

that since every new ”physical” action requires a new graphical animation, the majority of the

goals defined only involved SpeechActs.

It is important to note that these goals are associated to every culture and thus are known

by every character. As an example, the character that has a new house which still needs paint-

ing will activate the goal AskForHelpToPaintNewHouse. Then, the character who is asked

for help will choose between two goals: (1) OfferHelpToPaintNewHouse and (2) DenyHelp-

ToPaintNewHouse. If the characters have a neutral Like relationship, the first decision is

more likely to happen in the extreme collectivistic cultures, while the second is more likely to

be chosen in the extreme individualistic cultures. This happens because the first goal requires

the character to spend his own energy to benefit the owner of the house. Remember that,

according to Hofstede, in collectivistic cultures people tend to always look out for one another

while in the individualistic cultures people assume that they are only responsible for those they

share a very close bond [25]. Finally, if the character asked for help has a much lower status

than the owner of the house, he will then be more inclined to offer his help in an extreme high

power distance culture.

5.3.4 Rituals

Since the plot of our scenarios is relatively simple, we found it hard to create different rituals

for each of the four cultures defined. As such we decided to focus only on the Power Distance

and created two sets of specific rituals to reflect the opposite extremes of this dimension. We

have chosen Power Distance over Individualism, because we believe it has a greater impact

on rituals (people from a high power distance culture are very formal and ceremonious, while

people from a low power distance culture are the opposite [25]).

In total, agents will perform three ritual types: (1) Greeting Ritual (according to [7] greet-

ings are patterned routines that can be seen as mini rituals); (2) Welcoming Ritual ; and (3)


Dinner Ritual. The ritual differences that exist between the High Power Distance and the Low

Power Distance cultures are:

• Greeting Ritual - it is activated when two characters look at each other. In the Low

Power Distance cultures, the ritual is the same for all different status: the two characters

execute mutually a casual greeting gesture and say a casual greeting sentence to one

another. However, in the High Power Distance culture, rituals differ according to the

social status of the participants. When characters have the same status, they perform the

same actions as in the low power scenario. Yet, when a character greets a higher status

character, he has to bow to that character and also say a respectful greeting sentence,

which the character then replies with a casual greeting sentence. Furthermore, a different

ritual is used when greeting the elder. This ritual consists only in the character bowing

to the elder, while the elder doesn’t reply in any way.

• Welcoming Ritual - this ritual is performed by the host character when he welcomes the

guests to the party. The ritual consists simply in the host saying welcome to all agents

present, and then each agent replies with a gratitude sentence. The difference between

the Low Power Distance and the High Power Distance cultures is that the gratitude

sentences are far more formal and polite in the High Power Distance scenarios, while in

the Low Power cultures, the gratitude sentences are far more informal. Furthermore, the

host in a High Power Distance culture has to wait for the elder to arrive before starting

the ritual.

• Dinner Ritual - this ritual is activated after all the guests have arrived to the party. It

consists in the host announcing to the characters that the dinner will start and everyone

should take their seats. Then the ritual proceeds with the characters seating at the table

and starting to eat. However, while in the Low Power Distance cultures everyone rushes

to the table immediately, not even waiting for the host to finish the announcement (see

Figure 5.3), in the High Power Distance cultures everyone has to wait first for the elder

to sit before they can sit(see Figure 5.4), and then they have to wait for the elder to

start eating before themselves can eat. Moreover, the elder in the High Power Distance

culture has the privilege to sit in the more fancy chair.


Figure 5.3: Dinner Ritual (Low Power Distance Culture) - Screenshot Sequence.

Figure 5.4: Dinner Ritual (High Power Distance Culture) - Screenshot Sequence.

5.3.5 Symbols

Alongside the ritual definition, we also associated different symbols for the extremes of the

Power Distance dimension. Hence, the High Power Distance cultures have these two symbols:


<Symbol name="wave-hand" meaning="casual-greeting-gesture"/>

And the Low Power Distance cultures have only this symbol:


<Symbol name="thumb-up" meaning="casual-greeting-gesture"/>

Note that the symbols created were all used in the specification of the greeting rituals.

Our rationale for selecting these specific symbols was to emphasise the differences between the

opposite extremes of the Power Distance dimension, based on symbols found in real cultures.


In this chapter, we presented two different case studies where our agent architecture was

applied. The first case study consists in a game where users must be socially accepted by

a group of autonomous synthetic characters that have a very distinct culture. To make this

group of characters act in a cultural distinct manner, our agent architecture was used. The

second case study consisted in a short emergent story - a dinner party - with a small group of

characters, parametrised with four different cultures (using different dimensions, rituals and

symbols). The design of this emergent story was described, focusing on what lead us to choose

this particular situation. The design of the characters was also discussed. All the characters

have the same peculiar appearance to minimise cultural expectations that might arise in users.

Also, we gave individual properties to the characters to enrich the scenarios. In the remainder

of the chapter, we described the design of the different cultural parametrisations.


Chapter 6

Evaluation

6.1 Introduction

This chapter describes two different experiments that we have conducted using the Dinner

Party cultural scenarios of the previous chapter. Both experiments consisted in users visualis-

ing two cultural groups of characters with a different cultural parametrisation. Hence, we begin

with a discussion of the main objective of the evaluation, while the remainder of the chapter

focus on the two different experiments, describing their different methodology and results.

6.2 Objective

The work described in this dissertation focused on the following problem:




In order to address this problem, we created an agent architecture with an explicit model

of culture, which was grounded on anthropological studies of behavioural patterns in human

cultures. As such, the objective for our evaluation was to determine if the cultural elements we

have implemented are sufficient enough to lead to the user’s perception of different cultures.

The reason for conducting two experiments was to be able to compare the effect of only

modifying cultural rituals (and their associated symbols) versus the effect of solely modifying

the cultural dimensions parametrisation. For these experiments, we decided not to use the

67

68 CHAPTER 6. EVALUATION

scenario with a low power distance and collectivistic culture, because we did not found any

real culture that fits into that category.

6.3 First Experiment - Rituals

Our hypothesis with the first experiment is that participants will be able to perceive cultural

differences in the behaviour of two groups of characters, just by associating a different set of

rituals to each group.

6.3.1 Methodology

The design for the first experiment consisted in running our system with two different cultural

scenarios from the ”dinner party” case study: one with the High Power distance rituals and

the other with the Low Power distance rituals (both are extreme individualistic). A video was

obtained for each one of these cases.

Both videos were then used in an online questionnaire (Annex A), which starts by asking

participants to watch one of the videos and then answer two groups of questions about the

characters depicted in it. Afterwards, the participants were asked to watch the other video

and again answer the same groups of questions. After seeing both videos, the questionnaire

consists in two additional questions that tries to access if any differences between the videos

presented were perceived, and if so, if participants understood those differences as being caused

by the culture of the characters, or by their personalities, or by neither one of these factors.

Finally we asked users their gender, age, and nationality.

Since repeated measures were used, participants were randomly assigned to a visualisation

order. Roughly half of them saw the Low Power culture video first, and the High Power

culture second. Also, the criteria used for selecting participants was: (1) a good knowledge of

the English language, and (2) no prior knowledge of our system and/or its purpose.

Regarding the different question groups of the questionnaire, the first one consisted in six

different statements (e.g. ”The eldest male should be the head of the household”) to which the

participants had to decide if they were appropriate to the characters or not. These statements

represent cultural values associated either to a High Power/Low Power/Individualist/Collectivist

culture. Furthermore, the statements were based on the questions used by Hofstede in his ques-

tionnaire. In the second question group, participants had to choose a number between two

6.3. FIRST EXPERIMENT - RITUALS 69

opposite adjectives in a scale from -3 to 3, according to what they thought to fit best with

the characters (if the participant thought neither the left nor the right adjective matched the

characters shown, he/she was asked to choose the zero value). The adjectives chosen were:

Approachable/Distant; Pleasant/Unpleasant; Unfriendly/Friendly; Relaxed/Tense; Compas-

sionate/Indifferent; Serious/Cheerful; and Warm/Cold.

6.3.2 Results

We had a total of 41 participants aged between 18 and 40 years old of which 73% were male.

Regarding nationality, 39 participants were Portuguese, 1 Italian, and 1 South African.

Regarding the questions about the value statements, the results were inconclusive. A

possible explanation was that the questions themselves were confusing. In fact, after the

evaluation was done, many users reported that they felt they could not answer properly about

some of the statements due to lack of information for a ”correct” answer. One such statement

was ”It is right for workers to openly disagree with their superiors”. However, our intention

with this question group was for participants to respond just intuitively based on their first

impression made by the video.

Considering the adjectives, the Wilcoxon test was applied because the data was not fol-

lowing a normal distribution (some of the questions presented binomial distributions). The

results obtained are shown in Table 6.1. For two pairs of adjectives, Pleasant/Unpleasant

and Approachable/Distant, the result was very far from being statistically significant (p=0,898

and p=0,709), which signifies that the cultural differences expressed had no influence in these

particular adjectives. Also, the results for the adjective pairs Relaxed/Tense and Compassion-

ate/Indifferent are not statistically significant but are close to it (p=0,07 and p=0,08), with

both having a small effect size (r = 0,20 and r=0,19). This only suggests that the Low Power

Distance culture is perceived as slightly more relaxed and compassionate than the High Power

Distance culture.

More interestingly, the Serious/Cheerful pair yields significant results (p=0,001) and thus

we can affirm that there is a significant effect of the cultural behaviour in the user’s classification

of these adjectives, with a medium size (r=0,38). This indicates that users found the Low Power

culture cheerful and the High Power culture serious.

In the last two questions to assess directly if users perceived the videos as being different,

only 4 did not found any differences (from the 41 participants). This corresponds to near 10%


Table 6.1: First Experiment - Results for the user’s adjective classification

of the participants. We applied a Chi-square test just to make sure the result was not obtained

by chance. The Chi-square value obtained was 26,56 and it was highly significant (p=0,000).

From the resulting 37 participants (which answered they had perceived differences), we asked

them if they thought the differences were related to the character’s culture, the character’s

personality or neither. 67% answered culture, 30% personality and only 3% answered neither.

We performed a similar chi-square test, but removing the only participant that answered

neither of them. The Chi-square value obtained was 5,444 and was significant (p=0,02). These

are very good results since they imply that most users did in fact find differences in the videos,

and most of them considered those changes to be caused by the character’s cultures.

6.4 Second Experiment - Dimensions

The objective of the second experiment was to determine if users could recognise cultural

differences in the behaviours of two groups of characters, solely by changing their associated

value for the Individualism dimension. Namely, we wanted to check if users did in fact could

recognise one group as more individualistic and the other as more collectivistic.

6.4. SECOND EXPERIMENT - DIMENSIONS 71

6.4.1 Methodology

The design of the second experiment was very similar to the first one, involving the same type

of questionnaire, but now of one the videos shows an extreme collectivistic culture and the

other an extreme individualistic culture (both cultures have rituals associated to a High Power

distance). Moreover, the questionnaire suffered some revisions (see Annex B). Due to the

criticisms about the questions for the values statements, we’ve done the following changes: (1)

altered the phrasing of the first question group to ”Regarding the group of characters shown in

the previous video, what do you feel about how they think and act?”; (2) added a note stating

”the idea is to give an opinion based only on your first impression of the characters”; and (3)

changed the answer options from yes/no to a scale from -3 to 3 (similar to the one used in the

adjectives). Furthermore, we have added three more questions about values (see Table 6.2),

and an extra five pairs of adjectives (see Table 6.3).

6.4.2 Results

For this second experiment we had a total of 42 participants aged between 18 and 34 years old

of which 76% were male. Regarding nationality, 36 participants were Portuguese, 5 German,

and 1 British.

Concerning the values question group, unlike the first experiment, we now have many

significant results (again we used the Wilcoxon test). In Table 6.2 we can see that the results

for every value statement related to Individualism or Collectivism is statistically significant

(p <0,05). As such, we can affirm that users found the individualistic values to be more

appropriate for the individualistic culture and the collectivistic values to be more appropriate

for the collectivistic culture. The highest effect (r=0,38) was for ”They like to trust and

cooperate with other people” statement. In our perspective, these are very good results.

They suggest users can recognise appropriate differences related to cultural values in groups of

characters, by simply changing their parametrisation of our dimensions component accordingly.

Also note that none of the values related to the Power Distance dimension yielded signif-

icant results (p >0,05). This signifies that the cultural differences expressed (related only to

Individualism) had no significant influence for these particular values. However, one of these

statements (”Power and wealth are bad”) was close to being significant (p=0,058), with a weak

effect (r=0,021).


Table 6.2: Second experiment - Results for the statements classification.

For the adjective’s classification we used the Wilcoxon test once more. The results are

shown in Table 6.3. Except for the Equal/Biased and Warm/Cool every other pair of ad-

jectives yields significant results. Thus we can affirm that there is a significant effect of the

Individualism dimension score in the user’s classification of most adjectives. Amongst them are

the adjectives Individualistic/Collectivistic (which has the largest difference in averages) and

Independent/Sharing. This constitutes a very good result, since it demonstrates that user’s

interpretation of the characters’ behaviour matches the parametrisation of the dimensions

component.

6.4. SECOND EXPERIMENT - DIMENSIONS 73

Table 6.3: Second experiment - Results for the user’s adjective classification.

Users also found the characters in the collectivistic video to be more: Approachable; Polite;

Pleasant ; Friendly ; and Compassionate. All these adjectives have a positive connotation, but

aren’t directly related to Individualism or Collectivism. One possible explanation for this result

comes from the fact that the majority of the participants is from Portugal, which is a strong

collectivistic culture according to Hofstede’s findings (see Table 2.1). Assuming most of the

participants are in the ethnocentric stages of the DMIS model (see Figure 2.1), it is plausible

that they would rate the behaviour of another collectivistic culture more favourably. As such,

we think it would be interesting to repeat this experiment with participants from a strong


individualistic culture, such as the USA.

Finally, note that there was also a significant effect for adjectives that are more related to

the Power Distance Dimension. For example, users found the collectivistic culture to be more

Hierarchical than the individualistic culture, yet both cultures had a High Power Distance.

This is an interesting result that suggests that the behaviours caused by one dimension can

alter the user’s perception of behaviours more directly related to another dimension.

In the last two questions to assess directly if users perceived the videos as being different,

only 1 did not found any differences (from the 42 participants). This corresponds to only 3%

of the participants. We again applied a Chi-square test just to make sure the result was not

obtained by chance. The Chi-square value obtained was 38,095 and it was highly significant

(p=0,000). From the resulting 41 participants (which answered they had perceived differences),

63% associated the differences to personality, 30% to culture and only 7% answered neither.

We performed a similar chi-square test, but removing the participants that answered neither.

The Chi-square value obtained was 5,158 and was significant (p=0,023).


The purpose of this chapter was to describe the evaluation done to our agent architecture, using

the dinner party scenarios defined in the previous chapter. This evaluation consisted in two

different experiments, one related to Rituals and the other related to Dimensions. The overall

objective was to determine if the representation of these elements in our cultural architecture

is strong enough to lead to the user’s perception of different cultures.

Both experiments had a similar methodology and gave significant results. Regarding the

question where we ask explicitly if the users found differences in the groups visualised, most

users answered positively in both experiments. However, when asked about if those differences

were due to personality or to culture, the experiments had significant differences (see Figure

6.1). Even though less users found the differences were attributed to culture in the dimensions

experiment, it was in this experiment where users found the two groups to be more distinct,

in terms of adjectives and values.

This result corroborates Hofstede’s argument that different behavioural tendencies, associ-

ated to his dimensions are harder to interpret as cultural by the average person than rituals.

Also, note that despite the fact we exaggerated these tendencies by using an extreme parametri-


Figure 6.1: Results for: Do you think the differences are related to the culture or personality?

sation, users only saw two small groups of characters interacting with each other in a short

period of time. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the scenarios were longer

with many more characters and situations.


Chapter 7

Conclusion

In this dissertation, we argued that culture, a fundamental aspect of human societies, is an im-

portant notion to consider when developing social intelligent agents to represent autonomous

synthetic characters. However, culture is a very complex concept that has been greatly over-

looked in current systems. As such, we hope the work presented in this dissertation constitutes

an important step towards the answer of the following question:




Our hypothesis for solving this problem was:

If the behaviour of autonomous synthetic characters is driven by an agent archi-

tecture with an explicit model of culture, that is inspired by some aspects of human

cultures, users will be able to recognise cultural differences in different groups of

characters that differ exclusively in their cultural specification.

In order to prove this hypothesis we looked into the literature of anthropology to investigate

important elements of human cultures. Also, we conducted a small survey on autonomous

agents that were designed with cultural and social behaviour in mind. Inspired by our findings,

we defined a conceptual model of culture, which involved a dimensional model of behavioural

tendencies, rituals, and symbols. We then integrated this model into an already existent

autonomous agent architecture.

77

78 CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION

With the intention of evaluating the implemented architecture, we created a case study with

different cultural scenarios. They revolve around the same small group of characters having

a dinner party, differing only in the group’s cultural parametrisation. For the evaluation, we

have decided to conduct two separate experiments to compare the effect of only modifying

cultural rituals (and their associated symbols) versus the effect of solely modifying the cultural

dimensions parametrisation.

For the first experiment, participants watched two cultures that only differed in their rituals:

an individualistic high power distance culture and an individualistic low power distance culture.

67% of the participants interpreted the differences as being caused by the characters’ culture

(a statistically significant result). This is a very encouraging result as it shows that our model

for the creation of culture-specific agents using only rituals is powerful enough to lead to the

perception of different cultures by the users. Thus, just by changing simple rituals in a set of

agents, one may be able to create a culture that is perceived by users as different.

For the second experiment, participants watched two cultures with the same rituals but with

an opposite dimension score: an individualistic high power distance culture and a collectivistic

high power distance culture. Like the first experiment, we asked participants similar questions

about the cultures. Yet, unlike the first experiment, we had many statistically significant

differences in the description of the characters, in terms of values and adjectives. In fact,

users did found the characters more individualistic or more collectivistic in accordance to

the parametrisation used. This is also a very encouraging result, which suggests that our

computational model of Hofstede’s dimensions can lead to the perception of the different

behavioural tendencies associated. However, 63% of participants attributed the differences

to the characters’ personalities instead of culture (again a statistically significant result).

Thus, comparing the results of the two experiments, we find that our dimensional compo-

nent is capable of differentiating cultures, yet the differences are not interpreted as cultural.

On the other hand, the rituals component is capable of leading to the perception of different

cultures, yet few differences are identified. Therefore, we believe that both these elements

are very important and should be considered when creating an agent architecture for creating

different cultures. Finally, the overall results we obtained suggest that the proposed model is

in fact capable of solving (at least partially) the problem we have raised in this dissertation.

7.1. FUTURE WORK 79

7.1 Future Work

This work can be continued following a few directions for future research regarding our cultural

model and its improvement:

• First, we believe the following evaluations would be interesting to perform with the model

as it is: (1) Repeating the experiments with most participants belonging to a culture dif-

ferent from Portugal, in order to investigate if the results would still rate the collectivistic

culture more favourably; (2) Repeat the rituals experiment but with the revised question-

naire so we could run statistical tests combining the data from both experiments; and (3)

Investigate the combined effect of rituals and the dimensions component in differentiating

extremes of the same dimension.

• Also, only two of the Hofstede’s dimensions were considered. We think the inclusion of

the other three is not trivial and would provide an interesting challenge.

• Currently, characters have only a single culture associated, which is based on findings

of national cultures. It would be interesting to extend the model in such a way that

it was possible for characters to also belong to many different subcultures, due to their

membership in certain ethnic, religious, and social groups.

• We also believe cultural conflict between characters would be a very interesting research

topic to explore. An interesting idea is characters having different predispositions on

cultural differences, based on the stages of the DMIS model we analysed in the Related

Work chapter.

• Finally, another promising topic for further research would be the role of culture in

affective computing. Our model already contemplates an emotional appraisal affected

by culture. However, there are many other relations between culture and emotions,

described in [42], that would be interesting to include, for example the notion of cultural

display rules (how should one act when experiencing certain emotions).

80 CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION

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[59] Margaret Visser. The Rituals of Dinner. Penguin, 1992.

Appendix A

Rituals Questionnaire

Questionnaire

Please, in order to answer the following questions, watch carefully the following video: First Video

Regarding the culture shown in the previous video, can you say what is more appropriate about it:

The eldest male should be the head of the household *

Yes No

Power and wealth are bad in this culture *

Yes No

It is important for leaders to make all the decisions *

Yes No

It is right for workers to openly disagree with their superiors *

Yes

No

They like to trust and

cooperate with other people *

Yes

No

It is important for them to

be independent * Yes

No

How would you characterise the group of people depicted in the video?

Please tick the value between -3 and 3 that fits best, with -3 representing the left adjective and +3 representing the right adjective.

If you think that neither the left nor the right adjective fits the group of people depicted

in the video, tick "0".

http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~jdias/Video-a/Video-a.html#_blank

Approachable(-3) or Distant (3)? *

-3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

Pleasant(-3) or Unpleasant

(3)? * -

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Unfriendly(-3) or Friendly (3)? *

-3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

Relaxed(-3) or Tense (3)? * -3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

Compassionate(-3) or

Indifferent (3)? * -

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Serious(-3) or Cheerful

(3)? * -

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Warm(-3) or Cool (3)? * -3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

Please, in order to answer the following questions, watch carefully this other video: Second Video

Regarding the culture shown in this second video, can you say what is more appropriate

about it:

The eldest male should be the head of the household *

Yes No

Power and wealth are bad in this culture *

Yes No

It is important for leaders to make all the decisions *

Yes No

It is right for workers to openly disagree with their

superiors * Yes

No

They like to trust and cooperate with other people *

Yes No

It is important for them to be independent *

Yes No

How would you characterise the group of people depicted in the second video?

Please tick the value between -3 and 3 that fits best, with -3 representing the left adjective and +3 representing the right adjective.

If you think that neither the left nor the right adjective fits the group of people depicted

in the video, tick "0".

http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~jdias/video-b/video-b.html#_blank


-3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

Pleasant(-3) or Unpleasant

(3)? * -

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3


-3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

Relaxed(-3) or Tense (3)? * -3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

Compassionate(-3) or

Indifferent (3)? * -

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Serious(-3) or Cheerful

(3)? * -

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Warm(-3) or Cool (3)? * -3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

These next questions are about the two videos previously seen:

Did you notice differences in the two videos?

If yes, do you think most of those differences are related

to the culture or to the personality of the characters?

Finally, we would like to ask some information about yourself:

Gender? * Male

Female

Age? *

Nationality?

* = Input is required

Appendix B

Dimensions Questionnaire

Questionnaire

Please, in order to answer the following questions, watch carefully the following video:

First Video

Regarding the group of characters shown in the previous video, what do you feel about how they think and act?

Please select a value between -3 (strongly disagree) and 3 (strongly agree).

(Note: the idea is to give an opinion based only on your first impression of the characters)

The eldest male should be the head of the

household *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Power and wealth are bad *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

They are concerned with everyone's well-

being? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Personal achievements are very

important *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Direct confrontations should be avoided *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

It is important for leaders to make all the

decisions *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

It is right to openly disagree with

superiors *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

They like to trust and cooperate with

other people *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~jdias/hpid/hpid.html

It is important for them to be

independent *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3


Please select a value between -3 (left adjective) and 3 (right adjective).

If you think that neither the left nor the right adjective fits the group of people depicted in the video, tick "0".


-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Equal (-3) or Biased (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Independent(-3) or Sharing(3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Equalitarian(-3) or Hierarchical (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Polite(-3) or Impolite(3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Pleasant(-3) or Unpleasant (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Individualistic (-3) or Collectivistic (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3


-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Relaxed(-3) or Tense (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Compassionate(-3) or Indifferent (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Serious(-3) or Cheerful (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Warm(-3) or Cool (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Now please watch carefully this other video:

Second Video

Regarding the group of characters shown in the second video, what do

http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~jdias/hpcl/hpcl.html

you feel about how they think and act?

Please select a value between -3 (strongly disagree) and 3 (strongly agree).

(Note: the idea is to give an opinion based only on your first impression of

the characters)

The eldest male should be the head of the

household *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Power and wealth are bad *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

They are concerned with everyone's well-

being? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Personal achievements are very

important *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Direct confrontations should be avoided *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

It is important for leaders to make all the

decisions *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

It is right to openly disagree with

superiors *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

They like to trust and cooperate with

other people *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

It is important for them to be

independent *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3


Please select a value between -3 (left adjective) and 3 (right adjective).

If you think that neither the left nor the right adjective fits the group of people depicted in the video, tick "0".


-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Equal (-3) or Biased (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Independent(-3) or Sharing(3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Equalitarian(-3) or Hierarchical (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Polite(-3) or Impolite(3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Pleasant(-3) or Unpleasant (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Individualistic (-3) or Collectivistic (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3


-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Relaxed(-3) or Tense (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Compassionate(-3) or Indifferent (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Serious(-3) or Cheerful (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

Warm(-3) or Cool (3)? *

-

3

-

2

-

1

0

1

2

3

These next questions are about the two videos previously seen:

Did you notice differences in the two

videos?

If yes, do you think most of those

differences are related to the culture or to

the personality of the characters? Neithe

r

Cultur

e

Personalit

y

Documents

Creating Social and Cultural Agents - Autenticação · Creating Social and Cultural Agents ... resultados sugerem que o modelo proposto e de facto capaz de criar ... 2.2.1 Geert