With the advent of online social networks, recommender systems have became crucial for the success of many online applications/services due to their significance role in tailoring these applications to user-specific needs or preferences. Despite their increasing popularity, in general recommender systems suffer from the data sparsity and the cold-start problems. To alleviate these issues, in re...

Trust and distrust are two increasingly important metrics in social networks. Since many of these networks are very large, it is only natural that not all users know each other. To this aim, propagation and aggregation operators are often used to estimate (dis)trust relations for users that are not directly connected through the network. In this paper, we introduce bilattice-based aggregation a...

Modern trends in Peer-to-Peer systems lean towards self organized communities based on peer contribution. The inherent difficulty encountered in such systems is that selfish peers that are mutually distrustful of each other are expected to cooperate in order to enjoy the benefit of consuming the resources shared through the p2p system. Furthermore, self organized p2p communities depend on free ...

Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of ...

This paper presents and analyzes the attitudes of university students on presence, characteristics, causes and ways to overcome the crisis of morality. The aim of this study was to determine whether and how students recognize the presence of a morality crisis in our society, as well as the causes of this phenomenon. Also, the intention of the authors of this paper is to determine students’ atti...

BACKGROUND Investigators have voiced concerns that distrust of research and the medical community impedes successful recruitment of African Americans into clinical research. OBJECTIVES To examine possible differences in distrust by race and to determine to what extent other sociodemographic factors explain any racial differences in distrust. METHODS We analyzed data from 527 African America...

BACKGROUND Trust is critical to generate and maintain demand for vaccines in low and middle income countries. However, there is little documentation on how health system insufficiencies affect trust in vaccination and the process of re-building trust once it has been compromised. We reflect on how disruptions to immunizations systems can affect trust in vaccination and can compromise vaccine ut...

As more interactions are migrating to use Internet based communications, the level of dependence on external parties is increasing. This raises complex issues regarding which resources, services and agents you can trust. Interactions could be consumer/producer oriented where one particular organisation utilises a service provided by another. Furthermore it could be of a more collaborative natur...

Trust and distrust are two increasingly important metrics in social networks, reflecting users’ attitudes and relationships towards each other. In this paper, we study the indirect derivation of these metrics’ values for users that do not know each other, but are connected through the network. In particular, we focus on the aggregation step that is required for fusing trust and distrust informa...

We explore the role of deeply held beliefs, known as social axioms, in the context of employee– organization relationships. Specifically, we examine how the beliefs identified as social cynicism and reward for application moderate the relationship between employees’ work-related experiences, perceptions of CSR (corporate social responsibility), attitudes, and behavioral intentions toward their ...