The role of trust and deception in virtual societies

The authors argue that it is important to analyse the role of trust and deception in interactions between agents in virtual societies. In particular, in hybrid situations where artificial agents interact with human agents it is important that those artificial agents can reason about the trustworthiness and deceptive actions of the human counterpart. In order to support this interaction between agents in virtual societies, a theory on trust and deception must be developed. In the literature, a wide variety of theories on trust (less so on deception!) have been developed but not specifically for virtual communities. Based on these earlier scientific results, we make a first attempt to develop a general theory on trust and deception for virtual communities, and we discuss a number of examples to illustrate which objectives such a theory should fulfil.