Trusting Information Sources Through Their Categories

In this paper we want to focus our attention on the importance of categories for trust in information sources (TIS). We analyze an interactive cognitive model for searching information in a world where each agent can be considered as belonging to a specific category. We also consider some kind of variability within the canonical categorial behavior and their consequent influence on the trustworthiness of provided information. The introduced interactive cognitive model also allows to evaluate the trustworthiness of a source both on the basis of its category and of the past direct experience with it, selecting the more adequate source with respect to the informative goals to achieve. We present some selected simulation scenarios together with the discussion of their more interesting results.