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“The essential feature of such a test would be that it places the subject in a
transactional situation where he can achieve a desired goal only by adapting
his strategy to conditions which are continually changing as a consequence
partly, but not wholly of his own behavior. The 'social partner' in the test
need not be animate (though my guess is that the subject would regard it in
an 'animistic' way); possibly it could be a kind of 'social robot', a mechanical
device which is programmed on-line from a computer to behave in a pseudo-
social way.”
Thus, for Humphrey a test of social intelligence does not measure social 'rea-
soning', but addresses a social interaction situation. Nowadays we do have hu-
manoid social robots (e.g. Breazeal et al. 1999, 2000) which, if they are accepted
by human and non-human primates, could take the role of the interaction
partner in such a social intelligence test. Generally, interactions between an-
imate and inanimate social agents can indicate what kind of social knowledge
is necessary in order to achieve a certain social behavior, e.g. how much 'theory'
a social (and autobiographic) agent requires in order to be able to read others'
minds. Systematic experimental tests e.g. with a social robot might also shed
light on the role of narrative in social intelligence as discussed in this chapter.
Requirements for narrative agents
The evolution and development of natural social intelligence and story-telling
is based on the primate social field. This chapter explained that (1) research
in primatology points to the importance of social intelligence for the evolu-
tion of primate intelligence, and (2) autism shows how fundamentally an im-
pairment of social skills, and possibly narrative skills, can influence the life of
people, even if they show good non-social skills of intelligence. Thus, it seems
that in order to make artificial (robotic or software) agents story-tellers, they
need to be primarily
socially intelligent agents
4
(Dautenhahn 1998). Based on
our previous analysis of the primate social field the following list of necessary
requirements for a story-telling agent is suggested (this is not supposed to be
an exhaustive list):
1.
Individualized societies: The capacity to identify and recognize individual
group members.
2.
Social Networks: the capacity to establish, maintain, remember and utilize
social networks. Ability to
predict
the behavior of others and outcomes of
interaction. Agents need enough 'experience' and background knowledge
