Modelling the Role of Trust in Social Relationships

A social trust model is presented for investigating the social relationships and social networks in the real world and in social media. The results demonstrate that multi-level social structures, with a few strong relationships, more medium ties and large numbers of weak ties emerge in an evolutionary simulation when wellbeing and alliances are rewarded withhigh levels of social interaction. ‘Favour-the-few’ trust strategies were more competitive than others under a wide range of fitness conditions, suggesting that the development of complex, multi-level social structures depends on capacity for high investment in social time and preferential social interaction strategies