BACKGROUND Previous studies of loneliness have largely focused on establishing risk factors in specific age groups such as in later life or in young people. Researchers have paid less attention to the link between social capital and loneliness across different age groups. The aim of this study was to examine the association between social capital and experienced loneliness in different age grou...

A network of people having established trust relations and a model for propagation of related trust scores are fundamental building blocks in many of todayŠs most successful e-commerce and recommendation systems. Many online communities are only successful if sufficient mutual trust between their members exists. Users want to know whom to trust and how much to trust in the competence and benevo...

BACKGROUND Building or maintaining institutional trust is of central importance in democratic societies since negative experiences (potentially leading to mistrust) with government or other institutions may have a much more profound effect than positive experiences (potentially maintaining trust). Healthy democracy relies on more than simply trusting the national government of the time, and is ...

In this essay, we poke at several sacred cows (even though we like their milk and drink it ourselves) and point out several overlooked ordinary cows as well. We discuss our little herd of claims in five sections. Trust— " reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing " 1 —is pervasive in social systems. We constantly apply it in interactions between people, organizations...

Trust is a fundamental factor when people are interacting with each other, hence it is natural that trust has been researched also in relation to applications and agents. However, there is no single definition of trust that everybody would share. This, in turn, has caused a multitude of formal or computational trust models to emerge to enable trust use and dependence in applications. Since the ...

Trust matters profoundly for many dimensions of political life. In this article we focus on political trust: how the trust or mistrust citizens have toward the political process, politicians and government affects politics. Prior research has shown that political trust influences such crucial dimensions of politics as the basic legitimacy of government, political participation, voting behavior,...

Trust is essential for a secure and flourishing social life, but many economic and philosophical approaches argue that rational people should never extend it, in particular to strangers they will never encounter again. Emerging data on the trust game, a laboratory economic exchange, suggests that people trust strangers excessively (i.e., far more than their tolerance for risk and cynical views ...

Social networks have become the main infrastructure of today’s daily activities of people during the last decade. In these networks, users interact with each other, share their interests on resources and present their opinions about these resources or spread their information. Since each user has a limited knowledge of other users and most of them are anonymous, the trust factor plays an import...