Can the Votes of a Panel Measure Trust, Reputation, and Other Tricky Things?

How do you measure trust? I just read about an innovative social media approach as applied to news media, (thanks to PR Watch.org). NewsTrust, now still in beta, is "...a social network model which uses the intellect of the masses to rate all manner of news content and news sources..." So, as I take it, news sources will be rated by many readers to result in an overall score that roughly translates to "trustworthiness."

And that brings up an interesting thought: If you can derive a useful measure of trustworthiness by having a bunch of people just vote on it, then why couldn't we measure all kinds of tricky things by having people vote on them? Could we compare the trustworthiness of companies or politicians just by combining ratings from enough people?

And if so, then why go to all the media analysis effort of compiling a Reputation Index for big companies when you could just get a bunch of people to rate the companies? Hey, maybe there's already a social media site called YourRep.com or something where everyone can rank companies to provide an overall reputation score.

I guess if we can use Wikipedia to provide accurate information on, say, Total Quality Management (which I happen to have looked up there just a little while ago, and I feel more or less confident that what I read was accurate), then perhaps we can use a similar consensus-of-many approach to defining (or at least getting a handle on) more nebulous concepts as well. --WTP

Comments

[OIT2P News]

It is not easy to trust but in measuring trust it takes time and giving chance.

[Laurent Nicolas]

Yes, it could work, but votes are too easy to buy (at least on the Internet).
I've written a series of articles about the limits of the different reputation systems:
http://www.alenty.com/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/RelevanceReputationVotesAndGrades

[Ernest Sams]

I believe trust can be measured simply by measuring the likiness of your expectations being met or have been met with regards to a particular view on person, subject or thing.

Let me hear your view on this.

[Bill Paarlberg]

Thanks for suggesting an interesting measure of trust, Ernest. And it seems like it would be easily quantifiable: Trust could be expressed as the probability that an expectation is met. In other words, on a scale of 0 to 1, (with 0 being never and 1 being always) how likely is it that X Company or Y Politician will deliver on a promise?

But then how would one actually measure this? Wouldn't you have to have a lot of specific history or experience of a company or politician upon which to base the measurement? Consider the example of a charismatic but relatively inexperienced politician who is running for office. Who seems like a trustworthy person, but who doesn't have a long record of election promises to use in a measurement. How do we measure trust without a previous track record of exactly the situation we are interested in?

Has anyone ever measured trust in this fashion? Any studies out there?

[antonio]

Check out Trust-index (http://www.trust-index.com). It is a way to measure how trusted an item is. Items can be of very different nature (service providers, brands, persons, etc). The mechanism is pretty simple, users can vote each item from 1 (minumum trust) to 5 (maximum trust). An average (the Trust-index) is calculated from all the votes issued. The higher it gets, the higher trust that item is generating on voters.