Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 235

13.2 A SocioCognitive Model of Social Interaction,

Emotions, and Communication

According to one model of mind, social interaction, and emotions in terms of goals
and beliefs (Conte and Castelfranchi 1995 ; Miceli and Castelfranchi 1998 ; Poggi
2007 ), the life of any natural or artificial individual or collective system consists in
pursuing goals : regulatory states that, when sensed to be discrepant from the actual
state of the world, trigger action. To realize a goal, the system projects and performs
a plan where each action aims at one goal and possibly to one or more supergoals,
all in the end aiming at a final goal.

13.2.1 Power, Dependence, Adoption, Aggression, and Image

In this framework (Castelfranchi 2003 ), an Agent X has the “ power of ” g if X is
likely to achieve goal g , thanks to world conditions (e.g., material resources) or
X's own skills and knowledge. Evaluation is a belief about the extent to which
some object, event, or person has or provides one with the “ power of ” necessary
to achieve some goal (Miceli and Castelfranchi 1989 ; 1998 ). We make a positive
evaluation of something or someone if we think that thing or person can or will
allow us to achieve some goal and a negative evaluation when either it or the person
does not have the necessary resources to achieve the goal (negative evaluation of
impotence) or has resources that risk thwarting some goals (negative evaluation of
noxiousness). Therefore, systems - and typically humans - very often conceive of
evaluations about objects, events, and other people according to various aesthetic,
moral, utilitarian criteria (goals), judging people as good or bad, stupid or intelligent,
beautiful or ugly.
If X lacks the skills or resources to achieve g , while another Agent Y possesses
them, X depends on Y to achieve g .This dependence gives rise to the social devices
of adoption , influence , and aggression (Conte and Castelfranchi 1995 ). If X depends
on Y, then X can achieve g either if Y adopts X's goal g , i.e., if Y puts her actions
and resources to the service of X's goal, or if X aggresses against Y, i.e., she thwarts
some of Y's goals, to seize Y's resources. Thus, X and Y may have the goal of
influencing each other: X may want to influence Y to adopt X's goal gX, and Y
may want to influence X to pursue Y's goal gY in exchange. But if X depends on Y,
then Y has the “ power to influence ” X, and to exercise that power, X may threat to
use this power of aggressing against X, that is, of preventing X from achieving an
important goal. This gives Y “ power over ”X.
Adoption multiplies people's “ power of ” to achieve their goals, thanks to
resource exchange; but to decide what goals of what people to adopt, we need to
evaluate people and their capacity and willingness to reciprocate: we form an image
of them. Our image (Castelfranchi 1988 ; Castelfranchi and Poggi 1990 )istheset
of evaluative and nonevaluative beliefs others have about us. We strive to present a