Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Just as an abstract causal analysis of a plaui's faults can suggest repair strategies that will eliminate those faults [6], so too, an abstract causEil account of how a problem arises in a social situation can suggest relevant advice to correct the problem. In the social world, most problems arise as results of agents' actions; the best way to fix such problems is to modify the behavior that produces the problem. The vocabulary of volition developed in this paper is proposed as an abstract level of motivational analysis useful for discriminating among strategies for changing behavior. Volitional analysis focuses on the agents involved in an action. In addition to the actor, there is often a motivator agent w h o influences the actor and sometimes a third-party agent used as a tool by the motivator. If any of these agents can be swayed, the problematic action m a y be avoided. By identifying these agents and classifying the influences working on them, volitional analysis can suggest relevant modifications. The influences most often depend on the social context that links agents and estabhshes goal-generating themes. Behavior, however, is not always directly goal-governed, and volitional analysis recognizes these exceptional cases as well.