Cooperating through a belief-based trust computation

Many approaches to the trust study exist in literature. In our view, just a socio-cognitive approach to trust would be able to analyze the sub-components (the basic beliefs) on which the final decision to trust or not is taken. In this paper, we show a first implementation and advance of the socio-cognitive model of trust developed according to C. Castelfranchi and R. Falcone (1998) and R. Falcone and C. Castelfranchi (2001) using the so-called Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. With this implementation we show how the different components may change and how their impact can change depending from the specific situation and from the agent personality. We present a case study in the medical domain, with the choice between a Doctor and a Medical Automatic System. Another natural application of the model is a classical collaborative scenario, where each agent needs to evaluate the trustworthiness of the other agents in order to collaborate or delegate a task.