Reducing social uncertainty—understanding, predicting, and controlling the behavior of other people—is a central motivating force of human behavior. When rules and customs are not sufficient, people ...rely on trust and familiarity as primary mechanisms to reduce social uncertainty. The relative paucity of regulations and customs on the Internet makes consumer familiarity and trust especially important in the case of e-Commerce. Yet the lack of an
interpersonal exchange and the
one-time nature of the typical business transaction on the Internet make this kind of consumer trust unique, because trust relates to
other people and is nourished through
interactions with them.
This study validates a four-dimensional scale of trust in the context of e-Products and revalidates it in the context of e-Services. The study then shows the influence of
social presence on these dimensions of this trust, especially benevolence, and its ultimate contribution to online purchase intentions.
Introduction
Trust has emerged as a prevalent construct to describe relationships between people and between people and technology in myriad domains. Across disciplines, researchers have relied on ...many different questionnaires to measure trust. The degree to which these questionnaires differ has not been systematically explored. In this paper, we use a word-embedding text analysis technique to identify the differences and common themes across the most used trust questionnaires and provide guidelines for questionnaire selection.
Methods
A review was conducted to identify the existing trust questionnaires. In total, we included 46 trust questionnaires from three main domains (i.e., Automation, Humans, and E-commerce) with a total of 626 items measuring different trust layers (i.e., Dispositional, Learned, and Situational). Next, we encoded the words within each questionnaire using GloVe word embeddings and computed the embedding for each questionnaire item, and for each questionnaire. We reduced the dimensionality of the resulting dataset using UMAP to visualize these embeddings in scatterplots and implemented the visualization in a web app for interactive exploration of the questionnaires (
https://areen.shinyapps.io/Trust_explorer/
).
Results
At the word level, the semantic space serves to produce a lexicon of trust-related words. At the item and questionnaire level, the analysis provided recommendation on questionnaire selection based on the dispersion of questionnaires’ items and at the domain and layer composition of each questionnaire. Along with the web app, the results help explore the semantic space of trust questionnaires and guide the questionnaire selection process.
Discussion
The results provide a novel means to compare and select trust questionnaires and to glean insights about trust from spoken dialog or written comments.
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are becoming a popular method of meeting people and keeping in touch with friends. OSNs resort to trust evaluation models and algorithms to improve service quality and ...enhance user experiences. Much research has been done to evaluate trust and predict the trustworthiness of a target, usually from the view of a source. Graph-based approaches make up a major portion of the existing works, in which the trust value is calculated through a trusted graph (or trusted network, web of trust, or multiple trust chains). In this article, we focus on graph-based trust evaluation models in OSNs, particularly in the computer science literature. We first summarize the features of OSNs and the properties of trust. Then we comparatively review two categories of graph-simplification-based and graph-analogy-based approaches and discuss their individual problems and challenges. We also analyze the common challenges of all graph-based models. To provide an integrated view of trust evaluation, we conduct a brief review of its pre- and postprocesses (i.e., the preparation and validation of trust models, including information collection, performance evaluation, and related applications). Finally, we identify some open challenges that all trust models are facing.
We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a ...large web‐survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t0 and t1). The sample was self‐selected but diverse (a smaller subsample, n = 1,464, was pre‐stratified to be representative of the Swedish population on key demographics). We find support for the view that the corona crisis led to higher levels of institutional and interpersonal trust. Moreover, reactions were largely homogeneous across those groups that could potentially relate distantly to government authorities.
Research has revealed service industries' benefits from customer trust including positive effects on commitment, loyalty, sales effectiveness, and collaborative, cooperative, and successful exchange ...relationships. Yet, despite the relevance of customer trust, gaps remain in our understanding regarding its implications and effective management. Commencing with a consideration of the theoretical foundations of trust, this theoretical review paper highlights the key trust theories synthesising service industries and management literatures on trust, its levels, development, violations, and repair. Drawing on this, recommendations are offered for scholars regarding future research as well as for service firms and their representatives regarding enabling customer trust.
Many governments have implemented strict lockdown measures to prevent the transmission of the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Compliance with these restrictions is vital and depends greatly on the ...level of trust in the institutions central to their development and implementation. The objectives of this study were to assess: (1) the effects of the Dutch lockdown measures imposed in March 2020 on trust in government and trust in science; and (2) whether these differ across social groups. We draw on unique data from the high-quality Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel, which comprises a true probability sample of Dutch households (average participation rate: 80.4%). Our data were collected on an ongoing basis from December 2017 to March 2020 (n = 2219). Using the implementation of lockdown measures in mid-March as a natural experiment, we employed difference-in-differences analyses to assess the causal effect of the Dutch lockdown measures on trust in government and trust in science. We estimated that the imposition of the measures caused an 18% increase (95% confidence interval (CI):15%–21%)) in trust in government and a 6% increase (95% CI: 4%–8%) in trust in science. The impact on trust in government was greater among the participants aged 65 and older and those with poor self-assessed health, although the relevant CIs were wide and, in the case of self-assessed health, included the null. No differential effects were observed for trust in science. Our study indicates that the strict public-health measures imposed in the Netherlands during an acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic generated trust in the institutions involved in drafting and implementing them, especially among those with a higher risk of serious health outcomes. This suggests that, to prevent a major public-health crisis, people appreciate firm government intervention during the acute phase of an infectious disease pandemic.
•Studies the effect of COVID-19 lockdown measures on trust in government and science.•Implementing COVID-19 lockdown measures positively affected institutional trust.•Impact was greater among those with higher risk of serious health damage.
Most research on trust has taken a static, “snapshot” view; that is, it has approached trust as an independent, mediating, or dependent variable captured by measuring trust at a single point in time. ...Limited attention has been given to conceptualizing and measuring trust development over time within interpersonal relationships. The authors organize the existing work on trust development into four broad areas: the behavioral approach and three specific conceptualizations of the psychological approach (unidimensional, two-dimensional, and transformational models). They compare and contrast across these approaches and use this analysis to identify unanswered questions and formulate directions for future research.
•The study compares human-like and system-like trust in the sharing economy and online travel booking websites.•In Airbnb, human-like trust has a greater effect on usefulness, enjoyment, trusting ...intention, and continuance intention.•In online booking websites, system-like trust has a greater effect on trusting intention and continuance intention.•In online booking websites, human-like trust has a greater effect on usefulness and enjoyment.•Between contexts, for human-like trust, the path coefficients are stronger for usefulness, enjoyment, and continuance.
When using technological platforms embedded in the sharing economy individuals tend to trust the platform's human-like technological features more than its system-like features. In this paper, we investigate this idea by drawing on concepts from the distributed trust model, social cognitive theory, and affordance theory to compare the effects of human-like trusting beliefs and system-like trusting beliefs on four outcome variables—enjoyment, usefulness, trusting intention, and continuance intention—in two different contexts: Airbnb and “traditional” online travel booking websites (e.g., Expedia.com). The results suggest that in the context of Airbnb, human-like trusting beliefs have a greater effect on usefulness, enjoyment, trusting intention, and continuance intention than do system-like trust. In the context of traditional online travel booking websites, the results show that human-like and system-like trusting beliefs are at least of equal importance and specifically that the human-like trusting beliefs have a greater impact on perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment, while system-like trusting beliefs have a greater effect on trusting intention and continuance intention. We also compare the effects of human-like and system-like trusting beliefs between contexts. Implications for research and managerial considerations are also discussed.
Prior research has identified trust trait, trust expectation, trust risk and trust behavior as integral components of interpersonal trust. However, there still lack an in-depth exploration of the ...structural relationships among these integral components—how these integral components collectively constitute interpersonal trust. The current study innovatively proposed that interpersonal trust is anchored by individual trust trait, mediated by the dynamic equilibrium between trust risk and trust expectation, and culminates in trust behavior as the outcome. Interpersonal trust results from the synergistic interplay of individual and environmental factors. We called such structural relationships as the pyramid structure model of interpersonal trust, and proved its rationality by empirical evidence.
•The pyramid structure model: a novel perspective on interpersonal trust.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, conventional devices become smart and autonomous. This vision is turning into a reality thanks to advances in technology, but there are still challenges to ...address, particularly in the security domain e.g., data reliability. Taking into account the predicted evolution of the IoT in the coming years, it is necessary to provide confidence in this huge incoming information source. Blockchain has emerged as a key technology that will transform the way in which we share information. Building trust in distributed environments without the need for authorities is a technological advance that has the potential to change many industries, the IoT among them. Disruptive technologies such as big data and cloud computing have been leveraged by IoT to overcome its limitations since its conception, and we think blockchain will be one of the next ones. This paper focuses on this relationship, investigates challenges in blockchain IoT applications, and surveys the most relevant work in order to analyze how blockchain could potentially improve the IoT.
•Challenges to address the integration of the IoT with blockchain.•Analysis of blockchain potential benefits for the IoT.•Blockchain IoT applications and platforms for the development of IoT solutions.•Possible topologies to that integration.•Evaluation of blockchain nodes in IoT devices.
PDF
