Conclusions

We have presented our socio-cognitive analysis of trust. As we have seen, in this model trust is the final attitude useful for delegating or not a specific task and it is strongly based on specific beliefs, on different cognitive ingredients.

This possibility of characterizing the basic elements on which trust is founded is very important not only for a psychological view of this phenomenon but also for better understanding how this attitude in different circumstances works. In fact, the richness of the referred model (trust is based on many different beliefs) allows one to distinguish between internal and external attributions (to the trustee) and for each of these two attributions it allows us to distinguish among several other sub-components such as: competence, disposition, unharmfulness and so on. Our model introduced a degree of trust, instead of a simple probability factor since it permits one to evaluate the trustfulness in a rational way. This decomposition is important because:

1. the agent trusting decision might be different with the same global probability or risk, depending on its composition;

2. trust composition (internal vs. external) produces completely different intervention strategies: to manipulate the external variables (circumstances, infrastructures) is completely different than manipulating internal parameters.

In other words, if we understand what precisely the basic ingredients of trust are, we would be able to better model and also build artificial systems in which this attitude should be present.