Computing Trust as a Form of Presumptive Reasoning

This study describes and evaluates a novel trust model for a range of collaborative applications. The model assumes that humans routinely choose to trust their peers by relying on few recurrent presumptions, which are domain independent and which form a recognisable trust expertise. We refer to these presumptions as trust schemes, a specialised version of Walton´s argumentation schemes. Evidence is provided about the efficacy of trust schemes using a detailed experiment on an online community of 80,000 members. Results show how proposed trust schemes are more effective in trust computation when they are combined together and when their plausibility in the selected context is considered.