Evaluating a Framework for Representing Cultural Norms for Human Behavior Models

Cultural awareness training is seen as a necessity in the military, in international business, and in diplomacy. The Culturally-Affected Behavior project has defined a framework for encoding cultural norms and values that facilitates the creation of human behavior models having cultural knowledge separate from domain knowledge. We evaluated a simulation based on the framework as a tool for learning cultural norms. Users were provided a worked example of a meeting with a first virtual character as a training session, and were subsequently able to distinguish appropriate socio-cultural actions from inappropriate actions in a meeting with a second character of the same culture, and in a judgment survey.