Choosing people: the role of social capital in information seeking behaviour

Abstract: It is an almost universal finding in studies investigating human information behaviour that people choose other people as their preferred source of information. An explanation for the use of people as information sources is that they are easier to approach than more formal sources and therefore are a least effort option. However there have been few studies that have investigated who the people chosen as information sources are and what their relationship to the information seeker is. This paper reports findings that come out of a larger investigation of the information seeking behaviour of a random sample of residents of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Using the theory of social capital as a conceptual framework and the methods of social network analysis, this study investigated the relational factors associated with the choice of people as information sources. Results indicate that respondents chose people who had better resources than they had and were not well known by them. This suggests that respondents were deliberate in their choice of people information sources and therefore it is speculated that people are not necessarily the least effort option but may require considerable effort to seek out and consult.

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Collective Identity and Cooperation in a Public Goods Dilemma: A Matter of Trust or Self-Efficacy?

Abstract: According to Self-Categorization Theory people may define their self-concept in terms of collective identity when engaged in intergroup comparisons and in terms of personal identity when engaged in interpersonal comparisons. This difference in level of categorization (collective versus personal identity) is believed to affect the extent people identify with their group and subsequently their behavior in social dilemma situations. The present study investigates whether people contribute more in a public goods dilemma when collective identity is made salient than when personal identity is made salient, and further which processes may underlie this behavioral effect. Results revealed that people identified more strongly with the collective and contributed more when collective identity was made salient compared to when personal identity was made salient. Furthermore, this behavioral effect seemed to be mediated by perceptions of self-efficacy rather than by perceptions of the trustworthiness of people’s fellow group members.

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Interpersonal and Mass Communication: Matters of Trust and Control

Abstract: The proliferation of information technologies in our modern society offers an incentive to investigate various aspects of communication. This study is meant as a preliminary comparison of trust and control between interpersonal and mass communication. Drawing on the treatment of modernity and postmodernity, I investigate how individuals perceive their own action versus both friends’ and other people’s actions across two types of information sources -- the radio and a friend -- and types of messages -- going to a concert and going to a restaurant. These messages were chosen for similarities – both are enjoyable experiences – and differences, as we might expect various levels of expertise across sources on these topics. Data was taken from a college vignette study, and levels of trust in the content of the message were found to vary across sources of information, and a weak gender effect is evident when analyzing differences between perceptions of self and others’ actions.

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Audun Josang's papers

Josang's publications on trust models using his Subjective Logic and Beta Reputation System.

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Review of Conte, Rosaria and Paolucci, Mario: Reputation in Artificial Societies: Social Beliefs for Social Order

In depth review of the book.

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Agorics Inc.- The Agoric Papers

The three famous Miller & Drexler papers on agoric computing.

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The Digital Silk Road

1995 Agorics Inc paper on micropayment and reputation based markets.

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Dynamic Communities in Referral Networks

(PDF doc)

Abstract: Consider a decentralized agent-based approach for service location, where agents provide and consume services, and also cooperate with each other by giving referrals to other agents. That is, the agents form a referral network. Based on feedback from their users, the agents judge the quality of the services provided by others. Further, based on the judgments of service quality, the agents also judge the quality of the referrals given by others. The agents can thus adaptively select their neighbors in order to improve their local performance. The choices by the agents cause communities to emerge. According to our definition, an agent belongs to a community only if it has been useful to the other members of the community in prior interactions regarding a particular topic. Hence, the membership in different communities is determined based on relationships among the agents. This paper compares topic-sensitive communities of the above kind with communities as studied in traditional link analysis. It studies the correlation between the two kinds of communities as they emerge in referral networks and evaluates the two kinds of communities in terms of their effectiveness in locating service providers.

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Munindar P. Singh's Publications

Lots of papers on trust, referral networks and p2p search.

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Many-to-Many: Social Capital as Credit

Interesting blog and comments about the role of social capital and hints at what an online supporting structure may be useful for.

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Morton Deutsch

Notes from Morton Deutsch's book, The Resolution of Conflict (the one with the "Lady and the Tiger" story.

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Life With Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software

Long essay on history of using computers for communication and collaboration. 1940's, ARPA, augmentation, office automation, EIES, groupware, CSCW, social software, the future...

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Search In Referral Networks, Yu et al

Important question still not very well thought out by trust researchers: how to effectively/efficiently find trusted sources? Small worlds principles applied in this paper, and AI academic paper authorship links used as data.

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Paolo Massa Blog: Other papers analyzing Epinions.com web of trust

Papers on trust in Epinions. Link above points to Paolo Massa's paper and review of two others. Have been meaning to look at Epinions for a while. Must read these.

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Relevanta

Reputation based social software. To have a look at their rating system.

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The Nature of Trust: Conceptual and Operational Clarification (Donna M. Romano, PhD Thesis, Dec 2002)

Abstract: The importance of trust in working relationships is widely acknowledged among organizational researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, trust is defined and measured differently across studies, making it difficult to integrate and compare research findings. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to clarify the nature of trust as it exists across research and organizational settings. First, trust was conceptualized in terms of 10 defining characteristics based on a convergence and reconciliation of inconsistencies among existing definitions. These 10 characteristics of trust were incorporated into a single definition of trust to offer a more comprehensive description of the construct. Second, the Functional Trust Scale (FTS) was constructed to operationalize trust in terms of its 10 defining characteristics to provide a more complete and representative measure of trust that can be applied to a variety of situations. Third, empirical and statistical methods were employed to assess the structure and psychometric properties of the FTS. The results of this study provide initial evidence supporting the FTS and its underlying concept of trust. First, the hypothesized FTS measurement model resulted as the best fitting model among alternate models within two samples. Second, the FTS resulted in conceptual similarity across two applications, suggesting that it is applicable across multiple situations. Third, the internal consistency of the FTS and its sub-scales suggest that it is a reliable measure. Finally, the results provide initial support for the content, face, convergent, and divergent validity of the FTS.

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SECURE Project publications

More papers from the SECURE project.

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Marco Carbone's bibliography

Papers on a calculus for trust management and the SECURE project.

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Nine by Nine: Survey of Papers from the iTrust 2003 and 2004 Trust Management Conferences

Annotated biblio of all papers from iTrust '03 and '04.

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TrustCoM

Papers from the TrustCom project to build a framework for trust and contract management to be used by ad-hoc collaborative business groups (termed "virtual organisations").

"The mission of the TrustCoM integrated project is to provide a trust and contract management framework enabling the definition and secure enactment of collaborative business processes within Virtual Organisations that are formed on-demand, self-managing and evolve dynamically, sharing computation, data, information and knowledge across enterprise boundaries, in order to:

* tackle collaborative projects that their participants could not undertake individually or

* to collectively offer services to customers that could not be provided by the individual enterprises."


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Trust and Trustworthiness

Hardin, Russell. 1996. “Trustworthiness,” Ethics, vol. 107, no. 1 (October), pp. 26-42.

What's the difference between trust and trustworthiness?

Also Hardin's other works on trust on his research page.

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SECURE project trust model

The SECURE trust model has the nice concept that the domain of
trust values is anything which satisfies the requirement to have two
(partial) orderings defined upon it -- trustworthiness and information
content.

Their later work looked at instantiating this model using the
concept of event structures to describe contexts (categories) and
suitable values for measuring evidence which leads to a fairly
powerful but tractable model which is complementary to the logic of
belief presented by Jøsang.


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Pondering Digital Reputations || kuro5hin.org

author: andredurand
1 May, 2002

"Our reputation may affect our lives more than any other identity construct we have. Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and other such constructs are ultimately all methods to deal with the effects of reputation. Digital Identity will create Digital Reputations, and how technology handles this has very significant privacy and security implications..."

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Notes Toward a Moderation Economy || kuro5hin.org

author: localroger
28 Oct, 2003

"Although I'm filing this under Meta it is not a specific suggestion for immediate changes to Scoop. Rather, it is a set of ideas I've been mulling over based on what e-community engines like Scoop, Slashcode, and various web BBS packages are all trying to become, and how the next generation might do it even more effectively."

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