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inferential reasoning over the categories on which the world is organized (or could be thought
to be organized): real and mental categories.
6.6.1 Classes of Tasks and Classes of Agents
In our model of trust we consider the trustor (
X
) and the trustee (
Y
) as single agents,
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and the
task (
) as a specific task. For reasons of generality, optimization, economy, and scalability it
would be useful to apply the trust concept not only to specific tasks and to single agents. In fact,
it would be really useful and realistic to have a trust model that permits trust to be transferred
among similar agents or among similar tasks. In this sense having as reference classes of tasks
and classes of agents (as humans generally have) would be extremely important and effective.
A good theory of trust should be able to understand and possibly to predict how/when an agent
who trusts something/someone will therefore trust something/someone else, and before and
without a direct experience. And, vice versa, from a negative experience of trustworthiness it
could be possible to extract elements for generalizing about tasks and/or agents.
In this perspective we have to cope with a set of problems (grouped in two main categories):
τ
1) Given
X
's evaluation about
Y
's trustworthiness on a specific task
, what can we say about
X
's evaluation of
Y
's trustworthiness on a different but analogous task
τ
τ
? What should we
intend for an 'analogous task'? When does the analogy work and when does it not work
between
τ
? How is it possible to modify
X
's evaluation about
Y
's trustworthiness
on the basis of the characteristics of the new task? How can we group tasks in a class? And
so on.
2) Given
X
's evaluation about
Y
's trustworthiness on a specific task (or class of tasks)
τ
and
, what
can we say about
X
's evaluation of the trustworthiness of a different agent
Z
on the same
task (or class of tasks)
τ
τ
? Which are the agent's characteristics that transfer (or not) the
evaluation to different trustees?
In fact, these two sets of problems are strictly interwined with each other and their solutions
require a more careful analysis of the nature of tasks and agents.
6.6.2 Matching Agents' Features and Tasks' Properties
In general, we can say that if an agent is trustworthy with respect to a specific task (or class
of tasks) it means that, from the trustor's point of view, the agent has a set of
specific features
(resources, abilities and willingness) that are useful for that task (or class of tasks). But,
what does it mean: useful for that task? We can say that, again depending on the trustor's
point of view, a task has a set of
characterizing properties
requiring specific resources and
abilities of various natures, which can be matched in some way with the agents' features. The
attribution of the features to the agents, the right individuation of the tasks' properties and
the match between the first and the second ones represent different steps for the trust building
and are the bases for the most general inferential reasoning process for the trust generalization
phenomenon.
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Either an 'individual' or a 'group' or an 'organization'.
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