Section 5.3. The Time-Course of Trust
5.3. The Time-Course of TrustThe research on trust reviewed in earlier sections suggests a need for more explicit consideration of the ways in which trust develops over time. It is certainly worth distinguishing between the kinds of trust that support transient interactions and those that support longer-term relationships.[33] A number of authors[34] have suggested that three phases are important: a phase of initial trust, followed by a more protracted exchange, which then may or may not lead to a longer-term trusting relationship. If one considers trust in this developmental context, some of the findings in the literature make more sense. In particular, consideration of a developmental context helps to reconcile the tension between those models of trust suggesting that trust is a concept grounded in careful judgment of vendor expertise and experience, process predictability, degree of personalization, and communication integrity,[35] and those models suggesting that trust decisions depend much more heavily on the attractiveness and professional feel of a site.[36]
The importance of visual appeal in the early stages of interaction with a web site is not unexpected given that in face-to-face interaction, we often make judgments on the basis of the attractiveness of an individual, giving rise to the well-known halo effect.[37] Other influences on first impressions in face-to-face conversation include the small talk that strangers engage in. Some trust designers have tried to capture this in the design of relational agents that promote early trust. Thus, Bickmore and Cassell describe the use of small talk to build "like-mindedness" between interlocuters in the early stages of an interaction.[38] Although there is less documented research concerning trust in such interactions, the issue of how to make an agent trustworthy is likely to be important for future security systems.[39]
Another advantage of considering the developmental nature of trust is that it facilitates consideration of those factors that help to build trust and those that destroy it. A very early study of trust in automated systems demonstrated the intuitive finding that trust is slow to build up but can be destroyed very quickly.[40] This asymmetry is one of the reasons that researchers have suggested that the underlying processes involved in making or breaking trust are likely to be different. Thus, for example, McKnight et al.[41] describe two models, one for trust and one for distrust, and argue that disposition to trust and institution-based trust affects low/medium-risk perceptions, while disposition to distrust and institution-based distrust affects medium/high-risk perceptions. The authors found that in contexts where people were merely exploring a site, the disposition to trust was most salient. Once they had made up their minds to engage in a higher-risk interaction with the site, the disposition to distrust became more important. McKnight et al. also found that promoting some initial exploration of the site was easy initially (because of the readiness to trust) and that this initial exploration could then be used subsequently to overcome the inclination to distrust when the user went on to engage in risky behavior. Interestingly, McKnight also observed a kind of halo effect such that a professional and well-designed site was associated with a disposition to trust.
These findings are consistent with the heuristic-systematic models described earlier if we consider that people are initially disinclined to look for hard evidence of trust (in the form of systematic assessment of expertise and careful investigation of privacy and security policies), but are instead happy to engage with sites on the basis that they are attractive and easy to use. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 295