Finding underlying factors for reciprocal trust formation

Abstract

Trust in social media is an expression of faith that a user (called trustor) has a mind to accept the information provided by someone else (called trustee). While only a trustor in a one-way trust relationship tends to receive the information of his trustee, both users in a two-way (called reciprocal) trust relationship are willing to not only exchange their information but also give their feedbacks on the information. Although a two-way trust relationship represents a more tight relationship between people, previous researches mostly deal with finding underlying factors for a one-way trust formation. In this paper, we address reciprocal trust relationships by investigating what kinds of factors cause the formation of those relationships. Through extensive experiments for analysis, we found interesting observations and main factors related to the formation of two-way trust relationships.