During the past semester, three MSc-students supervised by BEHAVE-members wrote theses on moral choice behavior. Nienke Pieters, hosted by Goudappel Coffeng where she was supervised by Dr. Matthijs Dicke-Ogenia, studied to what extent moral considerations influenced consumers’ decisions for safety-enhancing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS); her thesis can be found here. Belle Visee, hosted by Mobycon where she was supervised by Babet Hendriks, studied the views of road users on (im-)polite behaviors by automated vehicles; her thesis can be found here. Anne-Fleur Tjon Joe Gin, hosted by Accenture where she was supervised by Rozemarijn de Koomen, studied to what extent consumers are willing to pay for more environmentally friendly package delivery services, and how this relates to their innate morality; her thesis can be found here. Congratulations to all three (former) MSc-students with obtaining their degree!

A paper written by Tanzhe Tang (PhD-candidate) and Caspar Chorus has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), which is a leading journal in the field of social simulation. The paper presents a new model of opinion dynamics. In contrast with previously proposed models, our so-called AOI (action opinion inference) model postulates that people learn about each others’ opinions not by observing them directly, but by observing each others’ actions and interpreting those. This added level of behavioral realism has important implications for the predicted population-shares of various types of opinions. As such, the AOI model provides an important stepping stone for more realistic models of moral norm formation, which are currently being developed in the BEHAVE-program. Congratulations with this publication, Tanzhe!

The full abstract reads as follows:  Opinion dynamics models are based on the implicit assumption that people can observe the opinions of others directly, and update their own opinions based on the observation. This assumption significantly reduces the complexity of the process of learning opinions, but seems to be rather unrealistic. Instead, we argue that the opinion itself is unobservable, and that people attempt to infer the opinions of others by observing and interpreting their actions. Building on the notion of Bayesian learning, we introduce an action-opinion inference model (AOI model); this model describes and predicts opinion dynamics where actions are governed by underlying opinions, and each agent changes her opinion according to her inference of others’ opinions from their actions. We study different action-opinion relations in the framework of the AOI model, and show how opinion dynamics are determined by the relations between opinions and actions. We also show that the well-known voter model can be formulated as being a special case of the AOI model when adopting a bijective action-opinion relation. Furthermore,we show that a so-called inclusive opinion, which is congruent with more than one action (in contrast with an exclusive opinion which is only congruent with one action), plays a special role in the dynamic process of opinion spreading. Specifically, the system containing an inclusive opinion always ends up with a full consensus of an exclusive opinion that is incompatible with the inclusive opinion, or with a mixed state of other opinions, including the inclusive opinion itself. A mathematical solution is given for some simple action-opinion relations to help better understand and interpret the simulation results. Finally, the AOI model is compared with the constrained voter model and the language competition model; several avenues for further research are discussed at the end of the paper.

During the first half of 2019, various BEHAVE-studies have been presented at symposia, workshops, and conferences. Tanzhe Tang presented his newest work on obfuscation and its effects on moral norm formation at the INAS symposium in St Petersburg, which brought together experts on Agent-Based Modelling for Theory Building in Social Sciences. Nicolas Cointe presented his work on how obfuscation influences coalition formation in multi-agent systems at the EXTRAAMAS workshop in Montreal, which focused on Explainable Transparent Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. His paper was nominated for best paper award! Caspar Chorus presented BEHAVE-research at various occasions, including an opening keynote at the National Econometricians Day, a seminar at Leeds University’s Choice Modelling Centre, a plenary talk at a workshop on Collective Decision-Making at the University of Amsterdam, and a guest lecture at the Netherlands Defence Academy. Are you interested in receiving slides? Please send us an email. Note that much our most recent work will be presented at the forthcoming International Choice Modelling Conference in Kobe, Japan, where we are also hosting two special sessions on moral choice models (featuring work from scholars outside the BEHAVE-team). More updates to follow!

The International Choice Modeling Conference 2019, which is the premier venue for choice modelers world-wide, will feature a special session on Models of moral decision making. The session, which is sponsored by the BEHAVE-program and organized by Caspar Chorus, Jürgen Meyerhoff and Ulf Liebe, will present novel work concerning the (theoretical) development and (empirical) testing of mathematical representations of human decision-making in morally sensitive contexts. Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full papers to a corresponding special issue, to be published in the JCR-listed Journal of Choice Modelling. The call for abstracts can be found here. We look forward to receiving your submission! Note that submission to this special session does not count against the ‘one presentation per registration’-quotum of the conference.

Andreia Martins Martinho and Teodóra Szép presented their research in Utrecht at the TRAIL PhD Congress 2018.

Andreia’s presentation titled ‘Novel perspectives on ethics and Autonomous Vehicles’ can be found here, and Teodóra’s presentation,  ‘Decision making with moral dimensions – Comparison of incentives for cooperative driving’, can be found here. Their abstracts -along with all other presenters’- can be found in the program book.

A paper that was co-authored by Caspar has been accepted for publication in one the Transportation field’s most prominent journals (Transportation). The paper presents the main results of the PhD-research of Mariska van Essen, who succesfully defended her dissertation last Friday at Twente University (Caspar was one of her supervisors, called ‘promotors’ in Dutch academia). Although Mariska and her project was not part of the BEHAVE-program, her work has obvious relevance for us. The paper analyzes the willingness of travelers to behave altruistically, in the sense of sacrificing small amounts of travel time to create benefits at the transport network level. This constitutes a classical social dilemma, in which freeriding (to use a transport-related metaphore) allows a traveler to benefit from other travelers’ altruistic choices. The paper’s abstract reads as follows: “This study examines to what extent travel information can be used to direct travelers to system-optimal routes that may be sub-optimal for them personally, but contribute to network efficiency. This is done by empirically examining determinants of travelers’ compliance with social routing advice. To that end, we conducted both a stated choice experiment and a revealed choice experiment (which also collected stated intentions and motivations for revealed behavior). Results from the stated choice experiment indicate a significant difference in compliance behavior across different information frames, societal goals, sizes of travel time sacrifices and personality. These findings are less evident from results based on analysis of revealed choices; i.e. the main motivation for revealed compliance seems to be an intrinsic motivation to contribute to improved throughput, while the main motivation for non-compliance relates to perceived traffic conditions. Moreover, the size of the travel time sacrifice seems not that important as expected. Nonetheless, comparing stated intentions with real-world behavior suggests that a relation between intention and compliance frequency does exist.”

Nicolas Cointe, who just started as a Postdoctoral researcher in the BEHAVE-program, has presented a paper titled “Ethics-based cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems” at the 2018 Social Simulation Conference which was held in Stockholm, August 20-24. The abstract of the paper, which was co-authored by profs Grégory Bonnet and Olivier Boissier, reads as follows: “In the recent literature in Artificial Intelligence, ethical issues are increasingly discussed. Many proposals of ethical agents are made. However, those approaches consider mainly an agent-centered perspective, letting aside the collective dimension of multi-agent systems. For instance, when considering cooperation among such agents, ethics could be a key issue to drive the interactions among the agents. This paper presents a model for ethics-based cooperation. Each agent uses an ethical judgment process to compute images of the other agents’ ethical behavior. Based on a rationalist and explicit approach, the judgment process distinguishes a theory of good, namely how values and moral rules are defined, and a theory of right, namely how a behavior is judged with respect to ethical principles. From these images of the other agents’ ethics, the judging agent computes trust used to cooperate with the judged agents.We illustrate these functionalities in an asset management scenario with a proof-of-concept implemented in the JaCaMo Multi-Agent Platform.” Welcome to the team, Nicolas, and we look forward to more research along these lines!

This week, a paper co-authored by Maarten Kroesen and Caspar has been published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The paper uses a combined Latent class-Markov modeling approach to study heterogeneity (across individuals) and changes (over time) in preferences of German citizens for sheltering refugees, a morally sensitive topic. The study was conceived by Professor Ulf Liebe from Warwick University, who also collected data, together with Dr. Jürgen Meyerhoff from TU Berlin. The contribution from the side of BEHAVE mostly concerned analyzing data using the above mentioned methodology, in which Maarten has special expertise. The study shows the potential of using sophisticated choice models in combination with data from discrete choice experiments, to explain and predict decision making behaviors in moral choice contexts.

A short abstract of the paper reads as follows: “Europe recently experienced a large influx of refugees, spurring much public debate about the admission and integration of refugees and migrants into society. This paper studies the acceptance of refugee and migrant homes in citizens’ vicinity and how it changes over time. Based on a repeated stated choice experiment on preferences for refugee and migrant homes, we show that the initially promoted “welcome culture” towards refugees in Germany was not reflected in the views of a majority of a sample of German citizens who rather disapproved refugee homes in their vicinity. Their preferences have not changed between November 2015, the peak of “welcome culture,” and November 2016, after political debates, media reporting and public discourse had shifted towards limiting admission of immigrants. A minority of one fifth of the sample population, who were initially rather approving of refugee and migrant homes being established in their vicinity, were more likely to change their preferences towards a rather disapproving position in 2016.”.

Friday 18 May, Caspar gave the closing keynote at the 18^th STRC, which took place in Ascona, Switzerland, at the Lago Maggiore. This annual conference, hosted this year by Kay Axhausen’s IVT-group at ETH Zurich, brings together the best of Swiss transport-research. In Caspar’s keynote, he presented the Obfuscation-model – see  below for more information ­– with particular focus on applications in transport such as related to Automated Vehicles. The slides can be found here. The conference was wonderful: high-level research efforts, great company including some old friends and many new faces; and, as we would expect from the Swiss, impeccable organization (thank you, Felix Becker!).