Socially Grounded Agentic AI: Coordinating Plural Perspectives through Social Theory

2026-08-04

AI Summary

Current AI alignment approaches struggle to manage conflicts and coordination among legitimate yet divergent values in pluralistic social contexts, largely due to a lack of understanding of how social values are organized and interact. This work addresses this gap by integrating sociological theories—such as role theory and field theory—into AI design, proposing a socially embedded, coordinative alignment paradigm. The approach employs role-based representations to model diverse perspectives and incorporates mechanisms for role activation, structured deliberation trajectories, and context-sensitive feedback loops to enable dynamic and accountable value coordination. By constructing a design space that supports structured, multi-perspective participation, this research lays the foundation for developing intelligent agents capable of effective, evaluable coordination in real-world social settings.

Abstract

As AI systems are deployed across increasingly diverse social contexts, alignment can no longer be framed as the optimization of a single, unified set of values. Instead, systems must be able to recognize, represent, and respond to multiple legitimate perspectives. This has led to growing interest in pluralistic alignment, which seeks to move beyond one-size-fits-all models of appropriate behaviour. However, current approaches often lack a clear account of how values are socially organized, contested, and coordinated in practice. In this paper, we argue that social theory provides essential conceptual and design resources for addressing these challenges. Drawing on established traditions in sociology, we show how perspectives can be understood as structured by roles, shaped through interaction, and distributed across fields of power and expertise. We translate these insights into concrete implications for AI system design, including role-based representations, structured coordination among perspectives, and context-sensitive evaluation. For agentic systems, this requires aligning not only final outputs, but also the role activations, deliberative traces, aggregation rules, and feedback loops through which those outputs are produced. Our contribution is to reposition pluralistic alignment as a problem of socially grounded coordination rather than output diversification. We outline a design space for systems that engage multiple perspectives in structured and accountable ways, and we identify directions for future work to implement and empirically evaluate these approaches in real-world settings.

Problem

• pluralistic alignment
• social theory
• value pluralism
• AI alignment
• social coordination

Innovation

• pluralistic alignment
• socially grounded AI
• role-based representation
• structured coordination
• agentic systems