Interactions as Social Practices: towards a formalization

Abstract

Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different levels of society, where many heterogeneous parties (software agents, robots, humans) are interacting and reacting to each other. In this paper, we present a formalization of a social framework for agents based in the concept of Social Practices as high level specifications of normal (expected) behavior in a given social context. We argue that social practices facilitate the practical reasoning of agents in standard social interactions.