The Relevance of Categories for Trusting Information Sources

In this article, we are interested in the fact that relevance and trustworthiness of information acquired by an agent X from a source F strictly depends and derives from X's trust in F with respect to the kind of information. In particular, we are interested in analyzing the relevance of F's category as indicator for its trustworthiness with respect to the specific informative goals of X. In this article, we analyze an interactive cognitive model for searching information in a world in which each agent can be considered as belonging to a specific agent's category. We also consider variability within the canonical categorical behavior and consequent influence on the trustworthiness of provided information. The introduced interactive cognitive model also allows evaluation of the trustworthiness of a source both on the basis of its category and on past direct experience with it, thus selecting the more adequate source with respect to the informative goals to achieve. We present a computational approach based on fuzzy sets and some selected simulation scenarios together with the discussion of their more interesting results.