We describe a computational model of social norms based on identifying values that a certain culture finds desirable such as dignity, generosity and politeness. The model quantifies these values in the form of Culture-Sanctioned Social Metrics (CSSMs) and treats social norms as the requirement to maximize these metrics from the perspective of the self, peers and public. This model can be used to create realistic social simulations, to explain or predict human behavior in specific scenarios, or as a component of robots or agents that need to interact with humans in specific social-cultural settings. We validate the model by using it to represent a complex deception scenario and showing that it can yield non-trivial insights such as the explanation of apparently irrational human behavior.
A central source of cultural differences is the communication of politeness, which can powerfully affect perception and behavior. Our computational adaptation of a universal theory of human politeness (from Brown and Levinson, 1987) combines culture-specific aspects of social context to generate expectations, score, interpret and recommend polite and impolite behaviors. Tests show this approach could reduce software development costs and increase an intelligent agent's behavior repertoire through the incorporation of modular, cross-cultural etiquette libraries. We argue that traditional cultural factors models (from Hofstede, Nisbett, etc.) are too abstract to provide good predictions of important human performance behaviors such as directive compliance. Instead, we focus on culture-specific social interaction behaviors (i.e., "etiquette") as a bridge between abstract cultural factors and human performance. We describe a computational model of etiquette and politeness perception, called CECAEDA (Computational Effects of Cultural Attributes and Etiquette on Directive Adherence). CECAEDA consists of four parts: (1) a culturally universal model of politeness perceptions, their causes and effects, (2) a culturally universal cognitive model compliance decision making and behaviors, (3) a set of hypotheses about how politeness perceptions alter directive compliance, and (4) a set of hypotheses about how cultural factors (specifically, those proposed by Hofstede [1]) affect etiquette perceptions and, thus, directive compliance in culture-specific ways. Each component is discussed in detail, followed by a brief presentation of our research test bed and paradigm for evaluating CECAEDA.