What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and

With the recent rapid growth of interest in MultiAgent Systems, both in artificial intelligence and software engineering, has come an associated difficulty concerning basic terms and concepts. In particular, the terms agency and autonomy are used with increasing frequency to denote different notions with different connotations. In this paper welay the foundations for a principled theory of agency and autonomy, and specify the relationship between them. Using the Z specification language, we describe a three-tiered hierarchy comprising objects, agents and autonomous agents where agents are viewed as objects with goals, and autonomous agents are agents with motivations.

This is the manuscript that was published, with only minor copy-editing alterations, as: Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834 Copyright 2001, American Psychological Association To obtain a reprint of the final type-set article, please go through your library’s journal services, or contact the author directly Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. Four reasons are given for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it de-emphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals, emphasizing instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as anthropology and primatology. Author notes

Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand. The author reviews evidence of such a bias in a variety of guises and gives examples of its operation in several practical contexts. Possible explanations are considered, and the question of its utility or disutility is discussed. When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service! (Mackay, 1852/ 1932, p. 552) Confirmation bias is perhaps the best known and most widely accepted notion of inferential error to come out of the literature on human reasoning. (Evans, 1989, p. 41) If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration. Many have written about this bias, and it appears to be sufficiently strong and pervasive that one is led to wonder whether the bias, by itself, might account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations. Confirmation bias has been used in the psychological literature to refer to a variety of phenomena. Here I take the term to represent a generic concept that subsumes several more specific ideas that connote the inappropriate bolstering of hypotheses or beliefs whose truth is in question.

The title of this paper suggests two distinct aspects of the models that we propose and consider. The first of these is the modelling of other agents by motivated agents.Thatistosay that the act of modelling is itself motivated and constrained by the agent doing that modelling. The second aspect is that all such models will also be of motivated agents. It is not sufficient merely to know what other agents are like, but also to knowwhytheyarelike that. This why aspect is what provides the extra information that allows a greater understanding of the interactions between entities in the world, and consequently provides for more resilient agents capable of effectively dealing with new and unforeseen circumstances in an uncertain world. Previous work has described a formal framework for agency and autonomy in which agents are viewed as objects with goals, and autonomous agents are agents with motivations. This paper considers the nature of cooperation within that framework. ...

Social behaviour arises as a result of individual agents cooperating with each other so as to exploit the resources available in a rich and dynamic multi-agent domain. If agents are to make use of others to help them in their tasks, such social behaviour is critical. Underlying this cooperation is the transfer or adoption of goals from one agent to another, a subtle and complex process that depends on the nature of the agents involved. In this paper we analyse this process by building upon a hierarchy previously constructed to define objects, agents and autonomous agents. We describe the motivated self-generation of goals that defines agent autonomy and the adoption of goals between agents that enables social behaviour. Then we consider three classes of goal adoption by objects, agents and autonomous agents. The first of these is merely a question of instantiation, the second requires an understanding of the relationship of the agent to others that are engaging it, and the third amounts to a question of negotiation or persuasion.

Human cognition is often biased, from judgments of the time of impact of approaching objects all the way through to estimations of social outcomes in the future. We propose these effects and a host of others may all be understood from an evolutionary psychological perspective. In this article, we elaborate error management theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000). EMT predicts that if judgments are made under uncertainty, and the costs of false positive and false negative errors have been asymmetric over evolutionary history, selection should have favored a bias toward making the least costly error. This perspective integrates a diverse array of effects under a single explanatory umbrella, and it yields new content-specific predictions. Better safe than sorry. (folk wisdom) Nothing ventured, nothing gained. (contradictory folk wisdom) These two wisdoms seem contradictory. The first urges caution, whereas the second reminds us that we have nothing to lose and should throw caution to the

In the paper we discuss variable and generative forms of autonomy. Variable autonomy is discussed in terms of the practicalities in designing autonomous agents, dealing as it does with the notion of degrees of autonomy and hence issues of agent control. The major part of the paper discusses an absolute, theoretically grounded notion of autonomy: the ability to generate one's own goals. This theoretical account of autonomy is embedded in the larger SMART framework and is intimately linked with the issue of motivation. Autonomous agents are motivated agents in that for the generation of goals an agent needs a set of higher order, non-derivative sources of action, or in our terminology, motivations. Autonomous agents in the SMART framework form the basis and source of action in multi-agent systems, which can thus propagate through the other entities in the system, such as non-autonomous agents and objects. We conclude with a discussion regarding the situations an autonomous agent would be willing to relinquish its autonomy thus linking the generative and variable notions of autonomy.

The economic conception of human behavior assumes that a person has a single set of well-defined goals, and that the person’s behavior is chosen to best achieve those goals. We develop a model in which a person’s behavior is the outcome of an interaction between two systems: a deliberative system that assesses options with a broad, goal-based perspective, and an affective system that encompasses emotions and motivational drives. Our model provides a framework for understanding many departures from full rationality discussed in the behavioral-economics literature, and captures the familiar feeling of being “of two minds. ” And by focusing on factors that moderate the relative influence of the two systems, our model also generates a variety of novel testable predictions.

is difficult. In this article we develop a cognitive framework to characterize sense-making in the implementation process that is especially relevant for recent education policy initiatives, such as standards-based reforms that press for tremendous changes in classroom instruction. From a cognitive perspective, a key dimension of the implementation process is whether, and in what ways, implementing agents come to understand their practice, potentially changing their beliefs and attitudes in the process. We draw on theoretical and empirical literature to develop a cognitive perspective on implementation. We review the contribution of cognitive science frames to implementation research and identify areas where cognitive science can make additional contributions.