Socio-Affective Agents as Models of Human Behaviour in the Networked Prisoner's Dilemma

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that socio-affective BayesACT agents, which integrate emotional and logical reasoning, can replicate most key human behaviors observed in the networked Prisoner's Dilemma, advancing human-agent interaction models.

Contribution

The study introduces BayesACT agents into the INPD simulation, showing they replicate multiple human-like behaviors better than imitation-based agents, highlighting their potential for human-agent societal modeling.

Findings

BayesACT agents replicate 4 out of 5 known human INPD behaviors.

They exhibit network structure invariance and anti-correlation of cooperation and reward.

Decision hyteresis is observed in over 2/3 of cases.

Abstract

Affect Control Theory (ACT) is a powerful and general sociological model of human affective interaction. ACT provides an empirically derived mathematical model of culturally shared sentiments as heuristic guides for human decision making. BayesACT, a variant on classical ACT, combines affective reasoning with cognitive (denotative or logical) reasoning as is traditionally found in AI. Bayes\-ACT allows for the creation of agents that are both emotionally guided and goal-directed. In this work, we simulate BayesACT agents in the Iterated Networked Prisoner's Dilemma (INPD), and we show four out of five known properties of human play in INPD are replicated by these socio-affective agents. In particular, we show how the observed human behaviours of network structure invariance, anti-correlation of cooperation and reward, and player type stratification are all clearly emergent properties of the networked BayesACT agents. We further show that decision hyteresis (Moody Conditional Cooperation) is replicated by BayesACT agents in over $2/3$ of the cases we have considered. In contrast, previously used imitation-based agents are only able to replicate one of the five properties. We discuss the implications of these findings in the development of human-agent societies.