This project seeks to develop a deeper understanding of trust than is supported by current methods, which largely disregard the underlying relationships based on which people trust or not trust each other. Accordingly, we begin from the notion of what we term normative relationships--or norms for short--directed from one principal to another. An example of a normative relationship is a commitment: is the first principal committed to doing something for the second principal? (The other main types of normative relationships are authorizations, prohibitions, powers, and sanctions.) Our broad research hypothesis is that trust can be modeled in terms of the relevant norms being satisfied or violated. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we are mining commitments from emails (drawn from the well-known Enron dataset) and using them to assess trust. Preliminary results indicate that our methods can effectively estimate the trust-judgment profiles of human subjects.
TEAM
PI: Munindar Singh Student: Anup Kalia
Normative Trust Toward a Principled Basis for Enabling Trustworthy Decision Making