Trust in information sources as a source for trust

The aim of this paper is to show how relevant is a trust model based on beliefs and their credibility, and an implementation of the socio-cognitive model of trust developed using the so-called Fuzzy Cognitive Maps.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how relevant is a trust model based on beliefs and their credibility.The approaches to the study of trust are various and very different from each of other. In our view, just a socio-cognitive approach to trust would be able to analyse the sub-components on which the final decision to trust or not is taken. In this paper we show an implementation of our socio-cognitive model of trust developed using the so-called Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. The model allows to distinguish between internal and external attributions and it introduced a degree of trust derived from the credibility of the trust beliefs, while the credibility of the beliefs derives from their sources and the sources' number, convergence, reliability (i.e. trust).With this implementation we show how the different components may change and how their impact can change depending on the specific situation and from the agent heuristics or personality. In particular, we analyse the different nature of the belief sources and their trustworthiness. We assumed different types of belief sources. For each trustier's belief one should consider what the content of the belief is, who/what the source is, how this source evaluates the belief, how the trustier evaluates this source (with respect to this belief). In addition for considering the contribution of different sources we need a theory of how they combine. The interesting thing in this paper is that starting from finding the sources of trust we are obliged to consider the trustworthiness of these sources.