Modeling Cultural Factors in Collaboration and Negotiation:Project Review

www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/icon.html

• Carnegie Mellon University: Dr. Katia Sycara, Dr. Baruch Fischhoff, Dr. Geoffrey Gordon, Dr. Laurie Weingart

• Georgetown University: Dr. Catherine Tinsley, Dr. Robin Dillon• CUNY and University of Michigan: Dr. Scott Atran, Dr. Jeremy Ginges• University of Michigan: Dr. Robert Axelrod• University of Pittsburgh: Dr. Michael Lewis• University of Southern California: Dr. David Traum, Dr. Ron Artstein• Army War College: LTC Charles Grindle

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Research ObjectivesConduct basic research to provide validated theories and

techniques for descriptive and predictive models of dynamic collaboration and negotiation that consider cultural and social factors.

• Generate theory on the cultural factors influencing dynamic cooperation and negotiation

• Develop and validate culturally sensitive models that embody the theory

• Develop and validate computational algorithms that embody the models

• Implement software that incorporate the algorithms

• Domains: Middle East, Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco.

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Overall Research Components• Sacred Values

• Cognitive schemata, lens for viewing cross-cultural interactions

• Interactive simulations (e.g. Observer Experiments)

• The role of emotions in conflict

• Computational Models of Cooperative and Self-Interested Interactions

• Virtual Humans

• Extensive Validation

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Identify Cultural FactorsCUNY, Georgetown, CMU

Computational ModelsCMU, USC

Virtual HumansUSC

ImplementationCMU

RESEARCHPRODUCTS

Surveys & InterviewsCUNY, CMU, U Mich, Georgetown

Cross-Cultural Interactions

U Pitt, CMU

Data AnalysisCUNY, Georgetown,

U Pitt, CMU

validation

validationvalidation

Validated Theories

Models

Modeling Tools

Briefing Materials

Scenarios

Training Simulations

Common task

Subgroup task

TheoryFormation

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Summary of Accomplishments• 2 Awards• 29 published papers in journals, books and peer

reviewed conferences• 2 Keynote Talks• 6 Wider publicity articles• 10 publicity articles by others about our work• 8 graduate students (fully or partially)• 4 postdocs (fully or partially)• 2 MS students graduated

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Awards• Laurie Weingart: Award: Most influential paper

published between 2001-2004. Awarded by the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management, 2009.

• Solomon, S, Hays, M, Chen G, Rosenberg, M, Evaluating a Framework for Representing Cultural Norms for Human Behavior Models, 18th conference on Behavior Representation and Simulation (BRIMS), Sundance UT, 2009 (Winner of Best Paper Award)

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AccomplishmentsCUNY and New School (leads) • Replication of the “backfire effect” in Indonesia and Iran

– Some Iranians consider right to nuclear program a Sacred Value• Studies to understand the role of humiliation in resolving

conflicts over Sacred Values– Finished in US– Started to duplicate those in India (Hindus and Muslims) and

Israel (Jews and Muslims)• Studies on adversarial perception of moral world views

(finished in US) • Studies in Lebanon to determine:

– identity– taxonomy of Sacred Values

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AccomplishmentsGeorgetown University (lead) and CMU• Data collection to determine cultural orientations

– Developed several survey scenarios (oil Iran-US; hospital location Iraqi-US; textile dispute Middle Eastern-Western)

– Pre-tested the materials on 2 different samples– Settled on the textile dispute– Collected data in US, Turkey, Egypt

• Initial analysis

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Accomplishments

U Pitt (lead) and CMU• Observer Experiments for the determination of cultural

stereotypes. – Design of experiment

• Similar scenario as in surveys

– Video recordings

– Pilot data collection in the US

– Initial data analysis

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AccomplishmentsCMU (lead) • Creation of two computational models of collaboration and

negotiation– Using game theory

• Accounts for strategic behavior of others• Equilibrium outcomes • Assumes other’s payoff is known (can be learned)• Very high computational complexity

– Using Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes• Does not consider all possible behaviors of others• Can derive optimal sequence of player’s actions• Does not assume knowledge of others’ payoffs• Decentralized• Lower computational complexity, thus can express realistic human

interactions

Why Computational Models?Computational models allow/enable us to:

•shed light into the information processing of the people (our own and members of the other culture) involved in the collaboration and negotiation

•make predictions about expected behaviors of members of the other culture

•make extrapolations of behavior to those for which we do not have data (data collection is very intensive and computational models fill holes in the data)

•model the dynamics of the interaction (most data collection efforts to date give static snapshots – surveys etc; in the MURI the CMU Team is collecting dynamic data, through observer experiments and through role playing interactions)

Why Computational Models?Computational models allow/enable us to:

•explore behaviors and generate hypotheses for theoretical constructs that must be further investigated

•point to places where new data need to be collected

•perform “what if” analysis and examine the effect of additional variables for which we have not collected data

•the additional variables could be recent changes and unexpected events where decisions must be taken by decision makers and there is no time to collect data

Why Computational Models?Computational models allow/enable us to:

•consider the effect of different counterstrategies that the decision makers are contemplating

•consider properties of optimal strategies that the model may have identified

• can be used for training our soldiers for effective behavior when faced with interacting with members of the other culture

For all these reasons computational models are sine qua non tools in the country’s SSTR (security, stability, transition and reconstruction) efforts

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AccomplishmentsCMU (lead)• Investigation of role of emotions in team conflicts• Algorithm development to allow for significant

computational efficiency of solving games• Efficient representation schemes

– Decisions, communications and actions of agents– Relational graphs of cultural notions

• Third party mediation and fair division• Conflict dynamics in multi-cultural societies

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AccomplishmentsUSC (lead)• Linguistic analysis of negotiation behavior to

recognize cultural frames of reference• Group conversational behaviors (e.g. proxemics

model US, Mexican, Arab)• Representing Cultural Norms in Human

Behavior (German, Iraqi, Japanese)• Analysis of language patterns used in negotiation

(Arabic, Spanish and English speaking)

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Accomplishments

• Inter-MURI organization on Modeling Inter-Cultural Collaboration and Negotiation at IJCAI-09 (Book)

• Initial effort in Turkey and Morocco to establish local Institutional Review Boards (CUNY and New School, lead)

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Plans for Next Year• Design of data collection instruments for second stream of data

collection– Survey for stereotypes in Qatar and possibly Iran

– Humiliation studies in India and Israel

– Studies in adversarial perception in India, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine

– Larger studies of Sacred Values in Iran, Lebanon, Morocco and Turkey

• Observer experiments in Turkey, Egypt, Qatar

• Theory formation as to similar and different factors in results thus far

• Extend computational representations for higher expressivity

• Extend computational algorithms for higher computational efficiency

• Incorporate rich inter-cultural interactions in computer models

• Integration of findings into computational models and Virtual Humans

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Keynote Talks

• Sycara, K. “Formal Computational Models in Negotiation”, Symposium on Computational Cognition for Social Systems, Singapore, June 9, 2009

• Sycara, K. “Negotiation and Culture”, Group Decision and Negotiation Conference, Toronto, Ca. June 14, 2009.

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Publications1. Solomon, Steven, Hays, Matthew, Chen Grace, Rosenberg, Milton, Evaluating

a Framework for Representing Cultural Norms for Human Behavior Models, Proceedings of the 18th conference on Behavior Representation and Simulation (BRIMS), Sundance UT, 2009 (Winner of Best Paper Award)

2. Ginges, J. & Atran, S. (in press). What motivates participation in violent political action: selective incentives or parochial altruism? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

3. Ginges, J. & Atran, S. (2009). Non-instrumental reasoning over sacred values: An Indonesian field experiment In D.M. Bartels, C.W. Bauman, L.J. Skitka, & D.L. Medin (Eds,), Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 50: Moral Judgment and Decision Making. San Diego: Academic Press. (http://idisk.mac.com/jeremyginges1-Public/Ginges&Atran2009.pdf)

4. Ginges, J., Hansen, I.G. & Norenzayan, A. (2009). Religion and popular support for suicide attacks. Psychological Science, 20, 224-230. (http://idisk.mac.com/jeremyginges1-Public/suicideattacks.pdf)

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Publications5 Atran, S. & Axelrod, R. Reframing sacred values. Negotiation Journal 221-

246, July 2008. (http://www.artisresearch.com/articles/Atran_Axelrod_2008_Reframing_Sacred_Values.pdf)

6 Atran, S. Who becomes a terrorist today? Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 2, Issue 5, January 2009. (http://www.artisresearch.com/articles/Atran_2008_Who_becomes_a_terrorist_today.pdf)

7 Atran, S. “Band of Brothers”: Civil society and the making of a terrorist. The International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, vol. 10, Issue 4, August 2008. (http://www.icnl.org/knowledge/ijnl/vol10iss4/art_3.htm)

8 Atran, S. & Henrich, J. The evolution of religion. PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), forthcoming.

9 Fischhoff, B., Atran, S., & Sageman, M. Mutually Assured Support: A security doctrine for terrorist nuclear weapons threats. Annals of the American  Academy of Political and Social Science (Special Issue: Terrorism Briefing for the New President) 618:160-167, 2008. (http://www.artisresearch.com/articles/Fischhoff_Atran_Sageman_2008_Mutually_assured_support.pdf)

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Publications10 Atran, S. Talking to the Enemy: The Dreams, Delusions and

Science of Sacred Conflicts, New York: HarperCollins (Ecco press), Paris: Editions Denoel, forthcoming.

11 Atran, Natural origins of the supernatural. In F. Fernandes, J. Fernandes & R. Berenguel (eds.) The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science. Anomalist Books, 2008.

12 Atran, The power of moral belief. In R. Sagarin & T. Taylor (eds.) Natural Security: A Darwinian approach to a dangerous world. New York: Blackwell, 2008.

13 Atran, The Evolution of Religion. In C. Crawford & D. Krebs (eds.) Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology. London: Psychology Press, 2008.

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Publications13 Atran, S. & Ginges, J. (January 25, 2009). How words could end a war. The New

York Times, p. WK12. *Reprinted in: International Herald Tribune, Edge.org, and The Huffington Post. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/opinion/25atran.html)

14 Ginges, J., & Atran, S. (2008). Humiliation and the inertia effect: Implications for understanding violence and compromise in intractable intergroup conflicts. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8, 281-294. (http://idisk.mac.com/jeremyginges1-Public/humiliation2008.pdf)

15 Sajid Siddiqi, Byron Boots, and Geoffrey J. Gordon.  Reduced-Rank Hidden Markov Models.  Submitted to Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2009.

16 Geoffrey J. Gordon, Sue Ann Hong, and Miroslav Dudík.  First-order mixed integer linear programming.  In Proc. 25th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2009.

17 Miroslav Dudík and Geoffrey Gordon. A sampling-based approach to computing equilibria in succinct extensive-form games. In Proc. 25th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2009.

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Publications18 Weingart, L. R. & Jehn, K. A. (2009). Manage intra-team conflict through

collaboration. In E. A. Locke (Ed.), The Blackwell Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior, 2nd Edition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers

19 Olekalns, M., & Weingart, L. R. (2008). Emergent negotiations: Stability and shifts in negotiation dynamics. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 1, 135-160.

20 Dudık, M., Gordon, G.J., McDonald, A.: Multi-agent Markov logic. Presented at NIPS 2008 Workshop on Probabilistic Programmming

21 Roie Zivan, Praveen Paruchuri and Katia Sycara, Truthful requirement elicitation for resource allocation, with no monetary payments Presented at the COIN Workshop of IJCAI-09.

22 Paruchuri, P., Chakraborty, Zivan, R., N., Sycara, K., Gordon, G, Dudik, M POMDP based Negotiation Modeling, IJCAI 2009 workshop on Modeling Intercultural Collaboration and Negotiation

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Publications23 Dudık, M., Gordon, G.J.: A game-theoretic approach to modeling cross-

cultural negotiation. Presented at IJCAI 2009 Workshop on Modeling Intercultural Collaboration and Negotiation

24 Sycara, K. and Dai, T. Agent Reasoning in Negotiation. The Handbook of Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, Forthcoming.

25 Turan, N. Dai, T., Sycara, K., Weingart, L. Toward a Unified Negotiation Framework: Leveraging Strengths in Behavioral and Computational Communities, IJCAI 2009 Workshop on Modeling Intercultural Collaboration and Negotiation

26 Lingzhi Luo, Nilanjan Chakraborty, and Katia Sycara. “Prisoner's dilemma on graphs with heterogeneous agents”. Proceedings of the 11th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation conference (GECCO09). Montreal, Canada, Jul. 2009. Selected for oral Presentation.

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Publications27 Lingzhi Luo, Nilanjan Chakraborty, and Katia Sycara.

“Modeling Ethno-religious Conflicts as Prisoner's Dilemma Game in Graphs”. Proceedings of International Symposium on Social Intelligence and Networking (SIN09). Vancouver, Canada, Aug. 2009. Selected for oral Presentati

28 Traum, D. Models of culture for virtual human conversations, In Proc. Of the Human Computer Interaction conference, 2009.

29 Weingart, L., Bear, J and Todotova, G “Excited to disagree? A Study of Conflict and Emotion”, Paper presented at the 2009 Annual conference of the International Association for Conflict Management, Japan, June 2009

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Publications of Wide Distribution and Impact• Atran, S. & Ginges, J. . How words could end a war. The New York Times, p.

WK12. *Reprinted in: International Herald Tribune, Edge.org, and The Huffington Post. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/opinion/25atran.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

• “The Moral Measure of a Civilization is in its Treatment of Enemies,” Huffington Post, April 18, 2009 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/the-moral-measure-of-a-ci_b_188579.html, 04-21-2009)

• “Resilient Faith,” The Guardian, 28 October 2008 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2008/oct/28/religion-anthropology-science, 10-28-2008)

• “Religion in America: Why Many Democrats and Europeans Don’t Get It,” The Huffington Post, 13 September 2008 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/religion-in-america-why-m_b_126225.html, 09-15-2008)

• “Fear versus hope in the Fight Against Terror,” by Scott Atran, Huffington Post, 25 June 2008 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/fear-versus-hope-in-the-f_b_109247.html, 06-26-2008)

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Feature Articles on Scientific Studies by S. Atran and Colleagues

• Newsweek “Can Admitting a Wrong Make It Right?” by Christopher Dickey, June 1, 2009 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/200135, 06-03-2009)

• Discover Magazine (“Top 75 Question of Science,” Special Issue, Spring 2008) http://sitemaker.umich.edu/satran/files/atran_discover_mag_75_top_qs_of_science_apr04.pdf

• Medical News Today (“Terrorism is a social problem, not a mental health or criminal problem,” 4 July 2008) http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113876.php

• El Periódico (Spain, “Scott Atran: ‘A los terroristas les mueve el deseo de gloria’," by Nuria Navarro, 27 November 2008) http://www.elperiodico.com/default.asp?idpublicacio_PK=46&idioma=CAS&idnoticia_PK=566167&idseccio_PK=1022

• National Science Foundation –(Respect for Sacred Values is Key to Conflict Resolution,” National Science Foundation Discovery, January 7, 2009) http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=112944&govDel=USNSF_1

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Feature Articles on Scientific Studies by S. Atran and Colleagues

• Washington Post and Newsweek (Blog, “Obama’s Outreach to Muslims Laudable but Passions Lack Reasonable Solutions,” by Susan Jacoby, January 29, 2009) http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/susan_jacoby/2009/01/obamas_outreach_to_muslims_lau.html

• New Scientist (“Born Believers, How Your Brain Creates God,” by Michael Brooks, February 4, 2009) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html?full=true

• Nature Magazine (“Darwin 200: Human Nature – The Remix – Universal Religion,” by Dan Jones, February 11, 2009) http://www.nature.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/news/2009/090211/full/457780a/box/2.html

• La Vanguardia (Spain, “Somos buenos por naturaleza? La ciencia estudia si existe una moral innata,” by Cristina Saez, May 16, 2009) http://www.lavanguardia.es/palm/20090509/53699835483.html

• Washington Times (“A fateful election for liberty,” by Nat Hentoff, 2 June 2008) http://www3.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jun/02/opinion-a-fateful-election-for-liberty/

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Feature Articles on Scientific Studies by S. Atran and Colleagues

• Newsweek (“Coddling human guinea pigs,” by Sharon Begley, 9 August 2008) http://www.newsweek.com/id/151756

• The Brussels Journal (Sarah Palin: Why Europeans don’t get it,” 14 September 2008) http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3518

• Reuters (“No Melting in Gaza’s Ice Cream War,” by Alastair Macdonald, January 29, 2009) http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2009/01/29/gazas-ice-cream-war/

• La Publica (Spain, “La ciencia es más efectiva que la política,” by Toni Poli, March 2, 2009) http://www.publico.es/ciencias/205351/ciencia/efectiva/politica

• Huffington Post (“The Moral Measure of a Society is in its Treatment of Enemies,” April 18, 2009) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/the-moral-measure-of-a-ci_b_188579.html

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• Search Magazine (“What happens to religion when it is biologized?’

by Nathaniel Schneider, May/June 2008) http://www.searchmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/May-June%202008/full-bioreligion.html

• Washington Times (“Terrorists planned 9/11 in India,” by Ashish Sen, 30 November 2008) http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/30/terrorists-planned-a-911-in-india/?page=2

Feature Articles on Scientific Studies by S. Atran and Colleagues