Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
However, there is an important presupposition to the traditional social psycho-
logical model. That is, it is assumed that the receiver of a message can obtain
sufficient and accurate information to evaluate the competence, benevolence, and
integrity of the sender. If the receiver was unable to obtain this information, or the
information was not credible even if obtained, s/he would be unable to judge
whether the sender may be trusted. The question is whether the internal components
of a website, such as those presented by Fogg et al. (
2001
), are sufficient to allow a
buyer to evaluate a seller's trustworthiness.
Compared with brick-and-mortar stores, transactions at online stores generally
involve greater social uncertainties because buyers are unable to confirm directly
the quality of a product or engage in face-to-face communication with the seller
(Reichheld and Schefter
2000
). Therefore, it is difficult to gather the sufficient and
credible information regarding the seller's competence, benevolence, and integrity
that is normally accessible at brick-and-mortar stores where customers can talk with
retailers and actually see the products (Kollock
1999
; Gefen
2000
). Traditional
social psychological approaches can be regarded as attempts to overcome this lack
of information through enriched, sophisticated website content and design. How-
ever, these improvements may not provide the consumer with sufficient signals
concerning competence and benevolence/integrity. The reason is that, at least
compared with brick-and-mortar stores, the components of e-commerce stores
can be much more easily imitated and reproduced, as has been evident in rampant
online phishing. Even if trust-building components are identified, these alone
cannot be relied upon as stable signals of a website's trustworthiness in the long
term because they are easily imitated and reproduced. This indicates that we need to
be careful in applying the definition of trust by Mayer et al. (
1995
) because, as these
authors noted, “this model is focused on trust in an organizational relationship, and
its propositions may not generalize to relationships in other contexts.” Mayer et al.
(
1995
) focused on the relationships in organizations such as between employers and
employees and between supervisors and their subordinates. Their relationships are
normally based on face-to-face interactions where they can obtain ample clues
about the competence, benevolence, and integrity of others, which is not necessarily
the case in e-commerce situations.
In summary, in e-commerce transactions where uncertainty caused by informa-
tion asymmetry is high, trust-building strategies based on traditional social psycho-
logical approaches may malfunction because internal components inside the
website that can be easily forged or imitated at lower cost cannot fully transmit
effective and costly signals. In this situation, enrichment and sophistication of
internal components of the website do not necessarily guarantee greater consumer
trust. In other words, having the appropriate internal components is a necessary but
not sufficient condition for gaining a customer's trust. This suggests that we need to
look beyond a website's internal components to understand customer trust building
in e-commerce.
