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Table 11.2
Internal and external factors for the doctor
Internal factors
Ability or
Competence
beliefs
They concern the (physical and mental) skills of the doctor;
his/her ability to make a diagnosis and to solve problems
Disposition or
Availability
beliefs
They concern both the willingness of the doctor to commit to
that specific task (subjective of the specific person or
objective of the category), and also his/her availability (in
the sense of the possibility to be reached/informed about
his/her intervention).
Unharmfulness
beliefs
They concern the absence (lack) of the risk of being treated
by a doctor; namely the dangers of a wrong diagnosis or
intervention (for example, for the health of the trustor).
External factors
Opportunity
beliefs
Concerning the opportunities not depending on the doctor
but on conditions external to his/her intervention. Consider
for example the case in which the trustor is very close to a
hospital in which there is an efficient service of fast
intervention; or again, even if the trustor is not very close
to a hospital he/she knows about new health policies for
increasing the number of doctors for quick intervention;
and so on. Conversely, imagine a health service not
efficient, unable to provide a doctor in a short time; or,
again, a particularly chaotic town (with heavy traffic,
frequent strikes) that could hamper the mobility of the
doctors and of their immediate transfer to the site where
the patient is.
Danger beliefs
These beliefs concern the absence (lack) of the risks and
dangers which do not depend directly on the doctor but on
the conditions for his/her intervention: for instance,
supposing that the trustor's house is poor and not too
clean, the trustor could see the visit of a person (the doctor
in this case) as a risk for his/her reputation.
In order to design the FCM and to assign a value to its nodes we need to answer four
questions:
1) Which value do I assign to this concept?
2) How sure am I of my assignment?
3) What are the reasons for my assignment?
4) How much does concept impact on another linked concept?
We address the first and the second question above by assigning numeric values to the
nodes representing the belief sources. The nodes are causal concepts ; their value varies from
-1 (true negative) to
1 (true positive). This number represents the value/degree of each single
trust feature (say ability ) by combining together both the credibility value of a belief (degree
of credibility) and the estimated level of that feature. Initial values are set using adjectives
from natural language; for example, 'I believe that the ability of this doctor is quite good (in
his work)' can be represented using a node labeled 'ability' with a little positive value (e.g.
+
 
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