Modelling normative awareness: First considerations

As software agents are being employed in more complex situations, experimental findings in the social sciences are becoming increasingly relevant to the computational sciences. The social scientific concept of situation awareness is now being utilized to quantify the success of an agent's environmental perceptual comprehension and causative processing. In this paper, we suggest that awareness of one's situation is not sufficient to succeed in navigating the growing complexity of agent-based social interactions. In human societies norms (personal, legal, and social) have emerged as multi-faceted mechanisms for prescriptive pressures projected onto individual's beliefs and intentionality. Here we define the term normative awareness as the perceptual comprehension of norms and the prediction of the causative effect of actions on norms. In this paper, we suggest that such awareness of the creation and perpetuation of norms would prove advantageous to agent-based research and review to what extent the multi-agent system literature has implicitly utilized the concept of normative awareness. We recognize that a ubiquitous merger of the vernacular between the social and computational sciences is unnecessary, as such, we discuss when and how normative awareness should be extended to agent-based modelling and multi-agent systems.