Abstract
Information provided by a source should be assessed by an intelligent agent on the basis of several criteria: most notably, its content and the trust one has in its source. In turn, the observed quality of information should feed back on the assessment of its source, and such feedback should intelligently distribute among different features of the source—e.g., competence and sincerity. We propose a formal framework in which trust is treated as a multi-dimensional concept relativized to the sincerity of the source and its competence with respect to specific domains: both these aspects influence the assessment of the information, and also determine a feedback on the trustworthiness degree of its source. We provide a framework to describe the combined effects of competence and sincerity on the perceived quality of information. We focus on the feedback dynamics from information quality to source evaluation, highlighting the role that uncertainty reduction and social comparison play in determining the amount and the distribution of feedback.
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Notes
Sincerity and competence are not the only features required to assess the trustworthiness of sources, so we propose to focus on them only as a useful first approximation. Demolombe (2001) emphasized the importance for a source to be not only correct (if it asserts something, then that information is true), but also endowed with a complete knowledge of a given domain (if something is true, the source is informed of it) and willing to share such knowledge (if the source is informed of something, then it shares that information with others). Moreover, it is also essential that the information provided by the source is relevant for the receiver’s goals, and that the latter has reasons to trust the source not to deliver useless news, even if they happen to be correct and complete (for discussion of trust in relevance, see Paglieri and Castelfranchi 2012). Discussing these further dimensions of information dynamics is left to future work.
\(c_{d}^{+}\) and \(c_{d}^{-}\) obey the property, typical of necessities and beliefs, that \(c_{d}^{+} > 0 \Rightarrow c_{d}^{-} = 0\) and, vice versa, \(c_{d}^{-} > 0 \Rightarrow c_{d}^{+} = 0\).
con(A) represent the conclusion of argument A.
Note that these principles are based on a number of assumptions (most notably, high level of independence and low probability of collusion among sources), and thus are not meant to be universally valid. Rather, they exemplify how simple rules-of-thumb can be identified to regulate feedback distribution, even without any explicit representation of context or agent’s mental states. Testing their validity across various communicative situations (e.g., how much collusion is required to make these heuristics ineffective?) is left as future work.
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Paglieri, F., Castelfranchi, C., da Costa Pereira, C. et al. Trusting the messenger because of the message: feedback dynamics from information quality to source evaluation. Comput Math Organ Theory 20, 176–194 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-013-9166-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-013-9166-x