A Cognitively Based Simulation of Simple Organizations

A Cognitively Based Simulation of Simple Organizations Ron Sun (rsun@rpi.edu) Isaac Naveh (yizchaknaveh@yahoo.com) Cognitive Science Department Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY 12180, USA Abstract Organizational Design This paper explores cognitively realistic social simula- tions by deploying the CLARION cognitive architecture in a simple organizational simulation, which involves the interaction of multiple cognitive agents. It argues for an integration of the two separate strands of research: cognitive modeling and social simulation. Such an inte- gration could, on the one hand, enhance the accuracy of social simulation models by taking into full account the effects of individual cognitive factors, and on the other hand, it could lead to greater explanatory, predictive, and prescriptive power from these models. Carley et al (1998) introduced an organizational decision task involving different types of organizational structures and agents. By varying agent type and structure sepa- rately, they studied how these factors interact with each other. The Task. The task is to determine whether a blip on a screen is a hostile aircraft, a flock of geese, or a civilian aircraft (Carley et al 1998). It has been extensively used before in studying organizational design. In each case, there is a single object in the airspace. The object has nine different attributes, each of which can take on one of three possible values (e.g., its speed can be low, medium, or high). An organization must determine the status of an observed object: whether it is friendly, neutral or hostile. There are a total of 19,683 possible objects, and 100 problems are chosen randomly (without replacement) from this set. The true status of an object is determinable by adding up all nine attribute values. If the sum is less than 17, then it is friendly; if the sum is greater than 19, it is hostile; otherwise, it is neutral. No one single agent has access to all the information necessary to make a choice. Decisions are made by inte- grating separate decisions made by different agents, each of which is based on a different subset of information. In terms of organizational structures, there are two archetypal structures of interest: (1) teams, in which agents act autonomously, individual decisions are treated as votes, and the organization decision is the majority decision; and (2) hierarchies, which are characterized by agents organized in a chain of command, such that in- formation is passed from subordinates to superiors, and the decision of a superior is based solely on the recom- mendations of his/her subordinates. In this task, only a two-level hierarchy with nine subordinates and one su- pervisor is considered. In addition, organizations are distinguished by the structure of information accessible by each agent. There are two varieties of information access: (1) distributed access, in which each agent sees a different subset of three attributes (no two agents see the same set of three at- tributes), and (2) blocked access, in which three agents see exactly the same attributes. In both cases, each at- tribute is accessible to three agents. Several simulation models were considered in Carley et al (1998). Among them, CORP-ELM produced the most Keywords: social simulation; organization; decision making; cognitive architecture. Introduction Most of the current work in social simulation still as- sumes very rudimentary cognition on the part of the agents (e.g., Gilbert and Doran 1994). At the same time, while researchers in cognitive science have devoted con- siderable attention to the workings of individual cogni- tion (e.g., Anderson and Lebiere 1998; Sun 2002), socio- cultural processes and their relations to individual cogni- tion have generally not been sufficiently studied by cog- nitive scientists (with some notable exceptions). However, there are reasons to believe that better mod- els of individual cognition can lead us to a better un- derstanding of aggregate processes involving multi-agent interaction (Moss 1999; Castelfranchi 2001; Sun 2001). Cognitive models that incorporate realistic tendencies, biases, and capacities of individual cognitive agents can serve as a more realistic basis for understanding multi- agent interaction. Social interaction is, after all, the result of individual cognition (which includes instincts, routines, and patterned behavior, as well as complex symbolic, conceptual processes). Therefore, the mecha- nisms underlying individual cognition cannot be ignored in studying multi-agent interactions. At least, the impli- cations of these mechanisms should be understood before they are abstracted away. In the remainder of this paper, first, an existing or- ganizational decision task is introduced. Then, a more realistic cognitive architecture, named CLARION, is de- scribed, which is applied to the organizational task. The idea is to substitute the more sophisticated agent, based on CLARION, for the simple agents used in the previ- ous work, with the aim of studying the interaction of cognition and organizational design.