Concepts and Constructs in Online Trust

Aszifa Aris, Norlia Mustaffa, Nurul Syafika Nadiah Mohd Zabarudin School of Computer Sciences

Universiti Sains Malaysia 11800 USM Pulau Pinang, Malaysia

aa10_com036@student.usm.my, norlia@cs.usm.my, nsnmz09_nu0473@student.usm.my

Abstract— Trust is vital in online environment. Without trust, it is impossible for online entity to achieve its success. In addition, trust research in online environment will be ongoing research as the online entity as e-commerce keeps on evolving and growing from time to time. As trust is large and multidimensional, it is hard to cover all dimensions and literature of trust. In this paper, some useful concepts and constructs in trust and online trust will be presented. In order to have a clear view on the basic concept of trust, this paper emphasizes on the importance of trust, problems in defining trust followed by discussion on the trust definitions. In evaluating and analyzing this concept, the researchers have taken five steps i.e. identify relevant evidence, select studies for inclusion, assess the quality of each study, synthesize the findings from individual study, interpret and make comparative evaluation on the studies. The important findings in this research yield the concept of trustor, trustee and trustworthiness in online trust, followed by identification of the trust dimension. Finally, the researchers also address trust types and forms in online trust.

Keywords-component; e-commerce; online trust; trust; trust forms; trust types

I. INTRODUCTION In human’s daily life, trust is vital as without trust, no

actions or transactions will be occurred. This is due to the reason that every action or transaction in human’s everyday living consist of ambiguity and risk and only with trust, humans proceed to commit these action or transaction. Consequent to this phenomenon, trust concept had become important to be researched among scholars from important fields, for instance – psychology, sociology, economics, and e-commerce. At present, trust had become central and the most significant research in bringing the success to e-commerce, as the transaction using Internet and websites requires the consumer to response and react with intangible entity and unknown people or situation. Due to this reason, trust concepts and constructs must be clearly defined by researchers especially for novice researchers that are still in early stages of research in online trust. Thus, this paper has the intention to yield the basic concept of trust and online trust. In this paper, the researchers provide basic concepts on trust by giving views on the importance of trust, problem in defining trust and discussion on the trust definitions. After that, the researchers provide methodology used in conducting this research for evaluating and analyzing online trust concepts and constructs. Next, this paper will present related concepts to online trust, dimension of trust, types of trust and form of trust.

II. BASIC CONCEPTS ON TRUST

A. The Importance of Trust In human’s everyday living, trust is a crucial factor in

initiating relationship and commitment. Trust is being said as the bottom line or basis for partnering [1]. Other than that, trust is the central component for effective working relationship in organizational view and furthermore trust is very important in handling the situation of uncertainty during organizational crisis [1]. In addition, trust also can play a role in decreasing complexity in organization [2]. In relationship formation, trust is the key element of credibility in commercial relationship [2] and key for positive interpersonal relationships [1].Relationship often end if trust is betrayed [3].

B. Problem in Defining Trust In trust research, researchers claim trust is a phenomenon

with ambiguity, as almost no one can give the solid base definition to trust that can be applied to all situations [4]. Researchers tend to define trust based on the specific context or field. For example, trust definition might vary among the field of psychology, sociology and economics. Psychologist defined trust from the perspective of personal trait, while sociologist view trust from social structure view and economist define trust from the viewpoint of economic-choice mechanism [5].

C. Trust Definition According to Oxford Dictionaries [6], trust is being defined

as "firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something" with further definition provided as "acceptance of the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation" and "the state of being responsible for someone or something". Other definitions included are "have faith and confidence" and "place reliance on"[6].

Many scholars had given their definition on trust based on their research. Trust includes two principal concepts which are reliance and risk [7]. In lieu of this, trust is an individual reliance on another party that could be an object, event, or a person under condition of risk [8]. It is important to understand reliance is "an action through which one party permits its fate to be determined by another" and "risk is the potential that the trusting party will experience negative outcomes" [7]. Another definition of trust that often arises among researchers is willingness to be vulnerable [9]. For example, in trust formation of a party-A to another party-B (Fig. 1), A is the

trustor while B is the trustee. A is willing to be vulnerable, with the expectation that B will perform the expected action of A, without A have the ability to control or monitor B.

Figure 1. Trustor and trustee

III. METHODOLOGY Trust research is complex and the terms being used to

explain the conceptual constructs may cause confusion. Thus, in order to carry out the review for this paper, the researchers need to outline careful steps to ensure the quality of the information. The steps taken are closely to the style of doing systematic review and comparative study.

Methodology in this review consists of five stages, as in Fig. 2.

Figure 2. Methodology

Firstly, the researchers identify relevant journal articles and proceedings by finding sources from global database such as ACM.

Then the researchers select studies for inclusion. All papers found are being reviewed in order to find the trust research that only related to the scope of this study. As this study intends to focus on the concepts and constructs in trust, the general keyword ‘trust’ is being used. The concepts and constructs that being chosen to be presented in the paper are based on the similarity of the terms used in selected articles and proceedings.

After that, the researchers make an assessment of the quality of each study, by ensuring the scholars are from those who have competencies in trust research.

Next, the researchers synthesize the findings from individual study on each paper. At this stage, reliable concepts and constructs are being extracted, and being synthesized in contextual explanation.

The researchers also used comparative analysis method. Here, concepts and constructs that seems similar in some aspect, yet, have some different in other aspect are put together in table form for comparison purpose.

Lastly, interpretation and comparison are being made to the concepts and constructs in generalizing the findings.

IV. RESULTS (ONLINE TRUST) In this section, the researchers provide the finding on online

trust. Online trust covers the trust concepts and constructs that often used in explaining trust in online environment. Firstly, the researchers provide the view of trustor, trustee and trustworthiness. Then, trust dimensions are discussed. Lastly, the researchers provide the trust types and forms in online trust.

A. Trustor, Trustee, Trustworthiness In making trust relationship to occur, there must be an

interaction between the trustor and the trustee. For example, in online trust, trustor is the individual that browsed the e-commerce website, searching for information and/or having intention to purchase goods from the e-commerce website. Trustee is the trusted party or trusted object of the trustor which relate to the e-commerce web site. Trustworthiness is the features of the trustee that forms basis for trust from the trustor.

B. Trust Dimension Trust is divided to hard dimensions of trust and soft

dimensions of trust [10]. The dimensions are inherited from the characteristic of the trusted party, which claimed by [10] to have the aspects of trustworthiness and functionality. Functionality refers to the ability, competence and predictability of the trusted object, while trustworthiness consist the characteristics or attributes such as honesty, integrity, benevolence and credibility. The hard dimension of trust is based on the cognition while soft dimension of trust is intrinsic, value-based motivation of the trustee to act in the interest of the trustor.

This dimension can be converted to online context (Table I), where the trusted party is the Internet, web, or the e-vendor and the characteristics indicated as in the above.

TABLE I. TRUST DIMENSION IN ONLINE CONTEXT

Dimension Aspect of Internet/ Web/e-Vendor

Attributes

Soft Trustworthiness • Benevolence • Honesty • Integrity • Credibility

Hard Functionality • Ability • Competence • Predictability

C. Trust Types and Forms There are various types and forms of trust being defined by

trust scholars. This section will address some classification of trust constructs that had been referred as types and forms of trust. Different scholars might be having their own view on what are ‘type’ and ‘form’ of trust.

Trust Types – McCord and Ratnasingam, defined two types of trust, technological and relational trust [11]. Generally, technological trust is related to the individual belief on the technology, while relational trust is related to consumer’s willingness to be vulnerable to the online transaction. Additionally, in technological trust, an individual believe in the capability of the infrastructure and control mechanism of a website while in relational trust, an individual is willing to be vulnerable, as the individual have a positive expectation to the behavior of the vendor. Rousseau claims that relational trust is build because of the relationship that exists between the trustor and trustee [12]. The repeated interaction between trustor and trustee provide information for the trustor to trust the other party.

Subsequently, reference [13] stated two types of trust, which is initial trust and experiential trust. Experiential trust also being known as knowledge-based trust [14]. Initial trust is spontaneous decision of the trustor to the trustee, without the trustor having any relationship experience with the trustee [11]. Differing from initial trust, experiential trust is where the trustor has had relationship experience with the trustee and can predict the trustee’s behavior in a situation [14].

Furthermore, in the context of online trust, initial trust is very crucial. This is due to the proof that there is link between trust in a web store and intentions to purchase from the web store [15]. Initial trust in online environment means the consumer is not yet familiar with the web business [16]. At this stage, only when there are positive belief and intentions from consumer to the website, willingness to purchase from the site will occur.

Besides that, during initial period of trust, there are two stages, which are introductory stage and exploratory stage [17]. In introductory stage, users do not have any experience within a specific website. Here, consumers are still trying to assess the website and web business based on second-hand information. Second-hand information means experiential information coming from others, which might include the information from other websites or site searchers. Consumers get the second-hand information according to what others had said about the site, or they assimilate the information from the advertisement about the site. Introductory stage ends when consumers first visit the site. After introductory stage ends, consumers will enter the exploratory stage. Here, the consumers will interact with the website for the first time and acquire the first hand information, as they explore the web. This condition builds the situation of familiarity, where consumers will start to consider doing business with the e-business. As a result, they will consider providing personal information or committing purchasing from the web.

Next, in looking to the experiential trust or knowledge-based trust from online perspective, this type of trust happens

when consumers are familiar with the web business. At this stage, consumers have their own ‘history’ with the web business based on previous experiences with the web. Not to confuse the experiential trust or knowledge-based trust with trust in exploratory stage of initial trust, experiential trust or knowledge-based trust refer to previous experiences with the web while trust in exploratory stage of initial trust refer to the first-time consumer’s experience with the web. Experiential trust or knowledge-based trust might be developed when consumers can predict the performance of the web based on previous experience while trust in exploratory stages of initial trust, consumers not yet have the ability to predict the performance as consumers just have the first time experience in using the web after entering the introductory stage.

Other than that, Uslaner differentiates between strategic trust and moralistic trust [11]. Strategic trust happen when the consumer decide that the website is ‘safe’ while in moralistic trust, the world view that an individual learn at early age is very important in determining the faith to take the risk in performing certain behavior. Table II presents the comparison of trust types.

Trust Forms – this section will address the forms of trust which are dispositional trust, interpersonal trust, institutional trust and calculus-based trust.

Dispositional trust - Dispositional trust is “propensity or tendency to believe in the positive attributes of others in general” [17]. Dispositional trust also being called as propensity to trust [13]. People with high dispositional trust will be willing to depend on the other party without knowing specific information or having experiences with the other party. Therefore, dispositional trust focuses on the trust formation of an individual from general life experience of the individual [11]. Usually, in the early stages of relationship, there is no specific information that an individual can get from the other party. This situation makes dispositional trust important in the initial stages of a relationship [16]. Dispositional trust is a form of initial trust [11, 14, 18] and having direct influence to institutional trust [11, 19] and interpersonal trust [11]. There are two important constructs in dispositional trust which are faith in humanity and trusting stance [20]. For the faith in humanity construct, there are sub constructs which are competence, benevolence, and integrity. Faith in humanity is related to the individual assumption that others are usually reliable because of their competency, benevolence, and integrity. Trusting stance is an individual assumption that they will get better outcome by dealing with the reliable party.

In online environment, consumers that have greater dispositional trust will be ready to trust the e-retailer although they only have limited information about the vendor compared to the consumer that exhibit low dispositional trust [11]. In relation with dispositional trust constructs, faith to humanity is related to the web business attributes while trusting stance is a consumer who has personal strategy in trusting a vendor until the vendor prove the individual wrong, whether or not the vendor have worthy characteristics [20].

Interpersonal trust – In interpersonal trust, there must be a relationship between two or more people (or groups) that

TABLE II. TRUST TYPES

Types Definitions Meanings in Online Context Stages Technological • an individual’s belief on the

technology

• consumers believe in the capability of the infrastructure and control mechanism of a website

-

Relational • repeated interaction between trustor and trustee that provide information for the trustor to trust the other party

• consumers are willing to be vulnerable to the online transaction

• consumers are willing to be vulnerable to a vendor as the consumer has a positive expectation to the behavior of the vendor

-

Initial • spontaneous decision of the trustor to the trustee, without the trustor having any relationship experience with the trustee

• consumers have positive belief and intentions to the website even though consumers are not yet familiar with the web business

Introductory • consumers do not have any

experience within a specific website

• consumers are still trying to assess the website and web business based on second-hand information

Exploratory • consumers will interact with the

website for the first time • acquire the first hand information

as they explore the web • consumers can predict the

performance of the web based on previous experience

Experiential/ Knowledge-based

• the trustor have had relationship experience with the trustee and can predict the trustee’s behavior in a situation

• consumers are familiar with the web business

• consumers have their own ‘history’ with the web business based on previous experiences with the web

-

Strategic • the trustor decide that the trustee as ‘safe’

• consumers decide that the website is ‘safe’ -

Moralistic • Faith to commit, • build based on general life view

• consumers willing to commit the transactions with the website, based on faith that build based on general life view

-

trust each other in specific situation [1]. In short, the trustor trusts a specific trustee. The trustor trusts the trustee as trustor believes that the word, promise, verbal or written statement of the trustee are reliable [21]. In online trust context, dispositional trust requires only limited information about the vendor but interpersonal trust is highly related to the trust that is formed by a consumer, when the consumer believe in the specific attributes of the web vendor or virtual team member. Besides, a consumer is willing to become vulnerable to the vendor [22].

Institutional trust - Compared to interpersonal trust that makes important of specific attribute about the trusted party, institutional trust can be defined as a set of belief that is being held by an individual about a specific context, such as structure or environment of the trusted party [22, 23].

In online trust, the institutional trust can be a form of trust toward the Internet and Web, without having to have specific information of the specific vendor [24]. Important construct in institutional trust is structural assurance of the web, where the trustor believes that favorable condition of the web is in place. Structural assurance can be referred to security features like encryption, protective privacy policies and practices, and policing of vendor abuses [23]. Other than that, institution-based trust can influence the formation of calculus-based trust form and relational trust type [24].

Calculus-based trust - Calculus based trust is one form of initial trust [24]. In calculus-based trust, the trustor gives attention to the cost and benefit before extending the trust, which means the trustor makes important of making decision rationally before extending the trust. In online context, the consumer will rationally weighs the losses and benefits before extending the transactions with the web. Table III provides the comparison of the trust forms.

D. Discussions From literature that has been studied, the researchers had

analysed the multidimensional nature of trust that consist of trust concepts and constructs, based on views from different scholars. Besides, the researchers had provided the comparison between each concept and construct in table form. From the literature, we can see that it is very difficult to define trust in specific meanings, or to generalize trust concepts to all situations. There can be many forms of relationship between one construct to another construct in trust formation, depending on the specific condition. Different condition might generate different relationship between each construct. Other than that, trust research originates from different sort of fields and areas that bring the literature to have definitions and clarifications from many and different views. This might be difficult to researchers in online trust, as there will be many

TABLE III. TRUST FORMS

Trust Forms Definitions Formation of trust Constructs Meanings in Online Context

Relationship / influence to other types/ forms of trust

Dispositional/ Propensity to trust

• propensity or tendency to believe in the positive attributes of others in general

• trust formation of an individual from general life experience of the individual

• faith in humanity

• trusting stance

• trust to e-retailer although a consumer only has limited information about the vendor

have relationship and influence on • initial trust • interpersonal trust • institutional trust

Interpersonal • relationship between two or more people (or groups) that trust each other in specific situation

• trustor believe that the word, promise, verbal or written statement of the trustee are reliable

- • trust that forms by a consumer, when the consumer believe in the specific attributes of the web vendor or virtual team member

• willingness of consumer to become vulnerable to the vendor

-

Institutional • a set of belief that is being held by an individual about a specific context

• trustor believe the favorable structure or environment of the trusted party

• structural assurance

• trust toward the Internet and Web, without having to have specific information of the specific vendor

• trustor believes that favorable condition of the web is in place

• calculus-based trust • relational trust

Calculus-based trust

• trustor give attention to the cost and benefit

• trustor weighing losses and benefits with then make decision rationally

- • consumer will rationally weighs the losses and benefits before extending the transactions with the web

have influence on • initial trust

explanations in suiting the trust concept and construct in the view of online trust research. Thus, in embarking online trust research, it is important to understand each concept and construct individually, which what the researchers provided in this paper. Perhaps, this effort will help the novice researchers to understand each concept and construct individually, and can form the view and understanding of online trust. Besides that, by understanding the basic concepts and constructs provided in this paper, it will help the novice researchers to grab a view in suiting the concepts and constructs to suit with their specific area of research in online trust. Overall, it is clear that trust formation in online trust context is highly related to the general faith of the trustor which is the consumer, and the attributes of the trustee which can be the e-vendor, the web, or the Internet.

V. CONCLUSION As trust is vital in human’s everyday living, trust is a

subject that always be on ongoing research by scholars from important disciplines like psychology, sociology, economics, and e-commerce. More than that, trust in e-commerce is a

very significant issue as trust had become the key element to make the success of e-commerce. Besides that, e-commerce had grown overtime, which bring the significant to the research of online trust, in ensuring the future of e-commerce success. Trust and online trust concepts and constructs are wide and very hard to be generalized to suits all the conditions. Thus, it is very important to understand each concept and constructs individually, as had been provided in this paper. In this paper, trust dimension, types and forms had been discussed. There are two dimensions of trust which are hard dimension and soft dimension. Besides that, the researchers had addressed six types of trust which are technological, relational, initial, experiential, strategic and moralistic. Finally, four trust forms had been analyzed and compared to each other. The trust forms include dispositional trust, interpersonal trust, institutional trust and calculus-based trust. In general, the researchers found that trust formation in online trust context is highly related to the general faith of the trustor which is the consumer, and to the attributes of the trustee which can be the e-vendor, the web, or the Internet.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The researchers are grateful to the School of Computer

Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia for their support in the form of APEX incentive grant and dedication in producing this research paper.

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