Social mental shaping: Modelling the impact of sociality on the mental states of autonomous agents

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agen ts that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their indivi dual mental states. Roles and social relationships provide an abstraction u pon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping. This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how commo n social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and neg otiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that ref lects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state.