Identifying the Role of Common Interests in Online User Trust Formation.

Lei Ji,Lei Hou,Qiang Guo,Jian-Guo Liu,Zi-Ke Zhang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0121105

Abstract

Despite enormous recent efforts in detecting the mechanism of the social relation formation in online social systems, the underlying rules between the common interests and social relations are still under dispute. Do online users befriend others who have similar tastes, or do their tastes become more similar after they become friends? In this paper, we investigate the correlation between online user trust formation and their common interests, measured by the overlap rate ρ and taste similarity θ respectively. The trust relation creation time is set as the zero timestamp. The statistical results before and after the trust formation for an online network, namely Epinions, show that, the overlap rate ρ increases greatly before the trust formation, while it would increase smoothly after the creation of the trust relation. Comparing with the empirical results, two null models are presented by shuffling the temporal behaviors of online users, which suggests that the accumulation of the common interests can result in the trust formation. Furthermore, we investigate the taste similarity θ of the common interests, which can reflect the users’ preference on their common interests. The empirical results show that the taste similarity θ is rapidly increased around the day when users trust the others. That is, the similar tastes on the common interests among users lead to the trust formation. Finally, we report that the user degree can also influence the effect of the taste similarity θ on user trust formation. This work may shed some light for deeply understanding the evolution mechanism of the online social systems.

Highlights

The social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Epinions etc., enable people to upload, disseminate and share what they like and to create relations with each other [1, 2]
We only focus on the difference of common interest overlaps before and after the relation creation time between each pair of users, say user u and user v
The role of common interests is important for the creation of online social relations

Summary

Introduction

The social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Epinions etc., enable people to upload, disseminate and share what they like and to create relations with each other [1, 2]. On the collective level, before the creation of the trust relation, not merely the average number of items commented by each user increases, but the users’ tastes on the newly selected items are increasingly similar.

Results

Conclusion