Towards Virtual Emotions and Emergence of Social Behaviour

Abstract

In our approach we explore emotional effects of virtual agents without human interaction. The idea is the following: emotion is considered a valuable means to explain social phenomena like the emergence of costly punishment. Now, would it be possible to put together a population of agents which mimics human society? Would it even be possible to show that certain personality configurations and emotional behavior emerge from interactions in a virtual agent society experiment? In previous work we selected the public goods game with punishment option because of its intriguing property of affect-based decisions [1]. In this paper we present our first approach to virtual agent population modelling which adopts a setting of the public goods game as it is used for studies on cooperative behaviour (see [1][3]). The discrete version of the game distinguishes between the roles of the punisher, the cooperator and the defector. As shown in [3] the iterated public goods game leads to a predominance of the defectors. This is changed by giving the participants the freedom to choose whether to participate in the game or not which gives the punishers a chance to get back into the game and it is shown that eventually they become dominant (see [3]).