Trust, Control and Autonomy: A Dialectic Relationship - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 188

precondition for an intervention; however it is also possible that either only the feedback or
only the intervention will hold. 3
Feedback can be provided by observation of Ag 2 's activity (inspection, surveilance, mon-
itoring), or by regularly sent messages by Ag 2 to Ag 1 , or by the fact that Ag 1 receives or
observes the results/products of Ag 2 's activity or their consequences.
As for Intervention we consider five possible kinds:
i) stopping the task (the delegation or the adoption process is suddenly interrupted by the
trustor);
ii) substitution (an intervention by the trustor allocates part of the (or the whole) task either
to the trustor themselves or to a third agent);
iii) correction of delegation (after the intervention by the trustor, the task is partially or totally
changed: the intervention transforms/changes the delegated task without any change of
task allocation to other agents);
iv) specification or abstraction of delegation (after the intervention by the trustor, the task
is more or less constrained; this is a specific case of the previous kind ( correction of
delegation ));
v) repairing of delegation (the intervention by the trustor leaves the task activity unchanged
but it introduces new actions (that have to be realized by either the trustee, or the trustor
or some other agent) necessary to achieve the goal(s) of the task).
Imagine that Ag 1 and Ag 2 have decided to prepare a dinner at home, and Ag 1 delegated the
task of cooking 'pasta with pesto' to Ag 2 while Ag 1 is preparing two tomato eggs; we have:
case (i) when for example suddenly Ag 1 stops this delegation to Ag 2 (maybe Ag 1 is no longer
hungry, she feels unwell, someone else has brought pizza to their house, and so on);
case (ii) when for example Ag 1 decides to prepare the pesto herself (maybe Ag 2 is not able
to find the ingredients, he is too slow, he is not able to mix the different parts correctly);
case (iii) when for example Ag 1 sees that the basilico is finished and suggests to Ag 2 that
they (or she prepares herself) the 'aglio e olio' as a sauce for spaghetti;
case (iv) when for example Ag 1 seeing that Ag 2 is not completely happy about the spaghetti
with pesto says to him to prepare spaghetti with the sauce he prefers;
case (v) when for example Ag 1 seeing that the pesto sauce prepared by Ag 2 is not enough
for two people, prepares an additional quantity of pesto.
Each of these interventions could be realized through either a communication act or a direct
contribution to the task by the trustor.
The frequency of the feedback on the task could be:
purely temporal (when the monitoring or the reporting is independent of the structure of the
activities in the task, they only depend on a temporal choice);
linked with the working phases (when the activities of the task are divided into phases and
the monitoring or the reporting is connected with them).
3 Sometimes we want to monitor the delegated action or its result not in time and in order for intervention. But just
for the future; for confirming or correcting out trust in Y (see later).