How to Trust: A Model for Trust Decision Making

This paper concerns decision-making processes that rely on trust. In particular, it analyzes how different aspects of trust (e.g., trust, trustworthiness, trustworthy evidence) influence trust decisions, and acting on them eventually. It proposes a trust decision model that structures the analysis of contextualized trust problems. Rather than seeking a general definition of trust, this paper advocates the necessity to have a structured way to analyze and characterize situational trust problems systematically. DOI: 10.4018/jaras.2012070102 International Journal of Adaptive, Resilient and Autonomic Systems, 3(3), 20-34, July-September 2012 21 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. decide to trust). On the one hand, it captures the sociality of trust. That is, it highlights the fact that trust is a social matter. On the other hand, it embraces the rationality of trust. That is, it takes into account trust as being rational. This paper advocates the investigation of how to relate trust, risk, and knowledge uncertainty to each other. One course of investigation is to look at them from a social perspective of trust (Krukow & Nielsen, 2007). Though, it is necessary to enrich such account by cultural aspects (which make possible to distinguish organizations, groups, etc.) and rational domain knowledge in order to tailor them to situated contexts. This paper is structured as follows. The next section provides a brief review of relevant work on trust in order to stress the complexity of the concept itself. Moreover, it identifies and describes some general aspects that characterize trust. It then introduces our structured account of trust, or trust decision model. The rationale is twofold. First, it is necessary to provide a systematic approach to clarify trust in situated contexts. Second, a systematic account is also useful in order to analyze decision making processes that rely on trust. The proposed trust decision model is used to analyze and structure different situational trust problems. It finally discusses how such trust problems relate to trust and relevant policies, and draws some concluding remarks.