When agents meet: empathy, moral circle, ritual, and culture

Creating agents that are capable of emulating the same kind of socio-cultural dynamics found in human interaction remains one of the hardest challenges of artificial intelligence. This problem becomes particularly important when considering embodied agents that are meant to interact with humans in a believable and empathic manner. We propose a list of basic requirements for these agents to be capable of such behaviour and we introduce a model of the social world intended for implementation in affective agent architectures. In our framework culture alters agents’ social relationships rather than directly determining actions, allowing for a deeper representation of empathy.