Bart A. Kamphorst

Human-agent teamwork in dynamic environments

Teamwork between humans and computer agents has become increasingly prevalent. This paper presents a behavioral study of fairness and trust in a heterogeneous setting comprising both computer agents and human participants. It investigates peoples choice of teammates and their commitment to their teams in a dynamic environment in which actions occur at a fast pace and decisions are made within tightly constrained time frames, under conditions of uncertainty and partial information. In this setting, participants could form teams by negotiating over the division of a reward for the successful completion of a group task. Participants could also choose to defect from their existing teams in order to join or create other teams. Results show that when people form teams, they offer significantly less reward to agents than they offer to people. The most significant factor affecting peoples decisions whether to defect from their existing teams is the extent to which they had successful previous interactions with other team members. Also, there is no significant difference in peoples rate of defection from agent-led teams as compared to their defection from human-led teams. These results are significant for agent designers and behavioral researchers who study human-agent interactions.

Incorporating BDI Agents into Human-Agent Decision Making Research

Artificial agents, people, institutes and societies all have the ability to make decisions. Decision making as a research area therefore involves a broad spectrum of sciences, ranging from Artificial Intelligence to economics to psychology. The Colored Trails (CT) framework is designed to aid researchers in all fields in examining decision making processes. It is developed both to study interaction between multiple actors (humans or software agents) in a dynamic environment, and to study and model the decision making of these actors. However, agents in the current implementation of CT lack the explanatory power to help understand the reasoning processes involved in decision making. The BDI paradigm that has been proposed in the agent research area to describe rational agents, enables the specification of agents that reason in abstract concepts such as beliefs, goals, plans and events. In this paper, we present CTAPL: an extension to CT that allows BDI software agents that are written in the practical agent programming language 2APL to reason about and interact with a CT environment.

Bedtime Procrastination: A Behavioral Perspective on Sleep Insufficiency

Abstract In this chapter, we discuss a specific domain of procrastination that significantly affects health and well-being, “bedtime procrastination”: the phenomenon of postponing going to bed, typically resulting in a lack of sleep. This chapter describes how a lack of sleep affects health and well-being, how bedtime procrastination plays a role in this regard, and why people do it. Essentially, we argue that going to bed late can be conceived of as a self-regulation problem, just like procrastination in other domains. Building on this conceptualization, we suggest interventions that may help people hit the pillow on time, and discuss avenues for future research. We conclude that considering sleep insufficiency from a self-regulation perspective may be an important step to further understanding and finding ways to reduce this self-undermining behavior.

Why option generation matters for the design of autonomous e-coaching systems

Autonomous e-coaching systems offer their users suggestions for action, thereby affecting the user’s decision-making process. More specifically, the suggestions that these systems make influence the options for action that people actually consider. Surprisingly though, options and the corresponding process of option generation—a decision-making stage preceding intention formation and action selection—have received very little attention in the various disciplines studying decision making. We argue that this neglect is unjustified and that it is important, particularly for designers of autonomous e-coaching systems, to understand how human option generation works. The aims of this paper are threefold. The first aim is to generate awareness with designers of autonomous e-coaching systems that these systems do in fact influence their users’ options. The second is to show that understanding the interplay between a person’s options and the e-coaching system’s suggestions is important for improving the effectiveness of the system. The third is that the very same interplay is also crucial for designing e-coaching systems that respect people’s autonomy.

Too depleted to turn in: The relevance of end-of-the-day resource depletion for reducing bedtime procrastination

Bedtime procrastination is an important predictor of sleep insufficiency in the general population (Kroese et al., 2014b), but little is known about the determinants of this self-undermining behavior. As the phenomenon has been conceptualized in the literature as a form of self-regulation failure (Kroese et al., 2014a), we hypothesized that people’s self-regulatory resources in the evening would be predictive of going to bed later than they intended. Specifically, we examined whether the cumulative effect of resisting desires, a measure of self-regulatory resource depletion (Hofmann et al., 2012b), relates to bedtime procrastination. Participants (N = 218) reported how many desires they had tried to resist during the previous day and the extent of their bedtime procrastination. Results show that people who attempted to resist more desires were more likely to engage in bedtime procrastination, suggesting that people may be less likely to stick to their intended bedtime after a particularly taxing day. Implications for intervention strategies are discussed.

Ethics of e-coaching: Implications of employing pervasive computing to promote healthy and sustainable lifestyles

Many people sincerely believe that it would be good to make lifestyle choices that have a positive effect on their own health, the social viability of their communities, and the longterm quality of the environment. Yet these same people often fail to act in accordance with these intentions. In this paper, we draw attention to the fact that peoples failure to maintain healthy and sustainable lifestyles can often be explained in terms of self-regulation failure. We explain that pervasive “e-coaching” technologies have the potential to support individuals in attaining and maintaining healthy and sustainable lifestyles by supporting and strengthening peoples self-regulatory capacities. Finally, we discuss six social and ethical concerns that e-coaching technology can raise as a first step towards an open debate about these concerns as well as the regulation issues and design choices related to them.

E-coaching systems

The ongoing digitalization and automation of coaching practices is rapidly changing the landscape of coaching and (health-related) self-improvement. The introduction of a new class of support technologies— “e-coaching systems”—promises to deliver highly personalized, timely, around-the-clock coaching in a wide variety of domains and to a broad audience. At the same time, the introduction of these systems raises a number of practical and ethical concerns regarding, for example, privacy and personal autonomy, that deserve careful consideration. Unfortunately, constructive conversations about these technologies are hindered by the lack of a precise understanding of what constitutes an e-coaching system and how e-coaching systems differ from other types of behavior change interventions. The broad and inclusive definitions that have been offered in the recent literature facilitate a systematic underestimation of the impact that the introduction of e-coaching systems will have, by allowing discussions to include examples of systems with which people are familiar but which lack the level of sophistication and independence needed for a genuine process of coaching. As a consequence, specific concerns that arise with sophisticated, adaptive systems that form their own perspective on a user’s health and behavior and from that perspective shape persuasive interactions, remain out of focus. This paper aims to remedy this situation by proposing a more narrowly construed definition of e-coaching systems.

Should Uplifting Music and Smart Phone Apps Count as Willpower Doping? The Extended Will and the Ethics of Enhanced Motivation

Our motivation isn’t always what we would like it to be. Owing to fatigue, laziness, boredom, or anxiety, our inclinations are sometimes out of alignment with our core goals and values. In such cases, realizing authentically held goals requires overcoming our inclinations, pulling ourselves together, and getting things done. If the motivation isn’t there, we need to get ourselves motivated, and this may require that we undertake indirect and even somewhat manipulative measures with ourselves. This wouldn’t be necessary, of course, if we could always increase our motivation simply by reviewing the reasons for doing something we don’t feel like doing. Realistically, however, virtually all of us regularly need to find other, non-reason-based means of increasing our motivation or making tedious tasks bearable. We play uplifting music to improve our mood; we set up little “treats” for ourselves to incentivize completing a boring task; and we cue up a series of tasks so that all we have to do is “crank the widgets.” Ordinarily, none of this is considered problematic until people start boosting their motivation with medications, at which point alarm bells go off over the prospect of willpower doping. In “Enhancing Motivation by Use of Prescription Stimulants: The Ethics of Motivation Enhancement,” Torben Kjærsgaard (2015) usefully highlights the distinctive concerns related to motivation-related forms of enhancement, which have been largely neglected in debates over enhancement. What is particularly interesting about Kjærsgaard’s discussion is that he brackets (without discounting) the most frequently raised objections to enhancement—having to do with pragmatic issues of safety and effectiveness and with interpersonal issues of fairness and coercion—so as to focus on ethical concerns with the ways in which voluntary pharmacological motivation enhancement jeopardizes the sense in which one leads a good life. He sums up his central claim as follows:

The Explanations People Give for Going to Bed Late: A Qualitative Study of the Varieties of Bedtime Procrastination

ABSTRACT Background/Objective: Bedtime procrastination is a prevalent cause of sleep deprivation, but little is known about why people delay their bedtimes. In the present research, we conducted a qualitative study with bedtime procrastinators to classify their self-reported reasons for later-than-intended bedtime. Participants: Participants (N = 17) were selected who frequently engaged in bedtime procrastination, but whose sleep was not otherwise affected by diagnosed sleep disorders or shift work. Method: We conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews and used thematic analysis to identify commonly recurring themes in the interviews. Results and conclusions: Three emerging themes were identified: deliberate procrastination, mindless procrastination, and strategic delay. For the form of procrastination we classified as deliberate procrastination, participants typically reported wilfully delaying their bedtime because they felt they deserved some time for themselves. For the category of mindless procrastination, a paradigmatic aspect was that participants lost track of the time due to being immersed in their evening activities. Finally, participants who engaged in strategic delay reported going to bed late because they felt they needed to in order to fall asleep (more quickly), which suggests that despite describing themselves as “procrastinating,” their bedtime delay may actually be linked to undiagnosed insomnia. The conceptual distinctions drawn in this paper deepen our understanding of bedtime delay and may be helpful for designing effective interventions.

Introducing a Continuous Measure of Future Self-Continuity

This article presents a continuous measure of future self-continuity (FSC-C) designed for use in web-based surveys. It allows researchers to assess on a continuous scale the similarity or connectedness that participants feel in relation to their future selves. The measure has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, where participants can drag one circle over another circle to a certain degree of overlap to indicate closeness of the relation between their present self and their future selves. The measure is highly customizable and is therefore also attractive for researchers in other domains (e.g., to measure Inclusion of Other in the Self). In this regard, the measure is an alternative to that reported by Le, Moss, and Mashek in this journal. This article describes the motivation for the development of the measure as well as how it is constructed.