The PECS framework: Emotion and social status

Representing human agents realistically in social situations is a concern for the PECS framework of Schmidt (2000), which has influenced the PAX simulator of military

humanitarian relief operations and addresses similar issues to the emotion extensions of SOAR. With PECS agents are represented as having “Physical conditions”, “Emotional state”, “Cognitive Capabilities”, and “Social Status”. This framework may be viewed variously as powerful - incorporating lots of aspects of agents - or as complicated - since full use of it involves many processes, each requiring assumptions and choices of parameters and distributions. Omitting some of the framework will simplify things, of course. Brailsford & Schmidt’s (2003) attempt to use PECS to add personality traits to a DES patient model “did not use the full PECS agent structure, in that our `patient’ entities had no sensor or perception components”. But although they report that adding PECS to a DES model was relatively easy, “further empirical work is required, firstly to derive and validate more realistic forms of the model equations, secondly to select the appropriate psychological variables, and thirdly and inevitably to collect data” - no small amount of work!

If we accept the relative complexity of the framework, can we find within it the resources needed to model energy and energising from social interactions? The PECS framework does include a concept named “Energy”. This refers to a fairly general agent resource, typically obtained from food, and comparable to energy in physiological terms. Lack of energy causes a drive - “hunger”. This is the main “Physical condition” of the agent. Emotional states can include “fear” and “anger”, and have an “intensity”, or degree. Both these and hunger are motivation concepts - they raise the chance of particular action responses - but they have no explicit link to social groups.

For a link to sociality we have to look at the concepts of “Social Status”. “Social satisfaction” is obtained up to a given maximum through membership of groups in response to an agent’s social need. The process of being satisfied is influence by an agent’s “social make-up”.

“Social make-up means an agent’s capacity to make contacts, to make friends, to experience joy on social occasions etc. This feature will determine how quickly an agent feels lonely and abandoned when he does not belong to a group and how quickly he is able to experience social satisfaction in a group.” (Schmidt, 2000, p.72)

From Cross & Parker’s work (2003b) one’s “energising characteristics” (see Chapter 2) will affect one’s capacity to make contacts - to find willing interaction partners, and thereby experience more joy. But Schmidt’s description of “social make-up” seems to stress being able to get something outof an interaction, rather than being able to put something in - and the grammar of “energiser” suggests the latter is what should be stressed in a concept of “energising”.

In the Learning Group Model (Schmidt, 2000, chapter 8) - intended to illustrate the concepts of “social status” - agents have no memories associated with particular groups or their members. Presumably these could be added under the framework as “Cognitive capabilities”, but we would then need an association between these and Social Status. In addition, it is not clear how the cultural capital of Collins’s theory would be modelled under PECS, given the close links in the theory with groups and

emotional energy. The concepts of “autonomy”, “relatedness” / belongingness and “competence” (Ryan & Deci, 2000; Quinn, 2007) are also absent.

So we are left feeling that PECS is not currently suitable as a framework for models of energy or energisers, though further development of the relations between its P, E, C and S components may alter this, and more widespread use of it may illustrate better its capabilities. In particular, it may yet prove to be a valuable basis for agent- based models of social phenomena if employed. But its present lack of connection with sociology or organisational studies, together with the relatively low number of papers reporting on its use by other researchers, means it does not tempt us away from the task of models based on energy theories.

3.7 Summary

Our quest for modelling techniques that might do justice to the concepts of Cross & Parker, Ryan & Deci and Collins has covered models of network evolution, contagion and social learning, groups and culture, work performance, and agent problem solvers of various designs.

Models by physicists linked abstract properties of evolving networks to real sociological phenomena such as the “small-world effect”, though currently lacking grounding in micro-sociological theory. Statistical analysis tools offered the chance to understand networks, cultural values and their dynamics, but had yet to be applied to those in possession of data on energising relations. Interest in contagion and learning in social networks had proposed several factors involved in the spread, and failure to

spread, of ideas. This led us on to one factor in particular, homophily, or preference for interactions with the culturally similar. When combined with imitation in Axelrod’s Cultural Model, this can generate cultural groups whose boundaries inhibit continued transmission of ideas between these groups - a phenomenon recognised in the communities of practice discussed in Chapter 1. A model of the evolution of cooperation - based on tags - offered an explanation for why humans have this preference for the similar, though we noted this model did not cover the same phenomena as a cultural model. Studies linking models to inter-ethnic conflict however demonstrate how important processes of cultural homophily are. Relating energy, groups and culture to some notion of work performance would also be important, but introduces extra factors, as would attempts to represent agents with cognition and specific goals and tasks. Some modelling frameworks have been proposed that represent agents with cognition, emotion and sociality, but none of them derive from the sociological theory incorporating social interaction, emotional energy, cultural capital and group solidarity.

Thus we conclude that there exists a gap for a simulation model based on notions of energy, especially Collins’s, to fill - one that might explain the relation between groups and cultural spread. In Chapter 6 we will describe a family of such simulation models. Before that, there is the matter of a potential rival - an attempt at a simulation model of “agents with energy and information” by Baker and Quinn (2007).