Social Mental Shaping: Modelling the Impact of Sociality on the Mental States of Autonomous Agents

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agents that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their individual mental states. Roles and social relationships provide an abstraction upon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping . This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how common social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and negotiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that reflects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state.