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clues about competence, benevolence, and integrity of the website in a bottom-up
way, but it is also usual for them to judge whether to trust a website based on the
information outside it.
However, there are a surprisingly small number of studies that investigate the
effect of external information on potential buyers' trust. This leads to a need for a
clear process model to explain what and how external information about
e-commerce stores influences trust among potential buyers. Rather than the tradi-
tional social psychological model, which assumes that information on a website's
competence and benevolence/integrity are readily available, we must adopt a
bounded rationality model that accounts for the constraints of social uncertainties
characteristic of e-commerce stores. In this study, we employ the SVS model to
investigate the trust-building process in e-commerce stores.
2.2.3 The SVS Model of Trust and Its Application to E-Commerce
The SVS model of trust was originally developed from risk perception studies.
According to Earle and Cvetkovich (
1995
), people trust others when they perceive
that they have the same salient values. For example, citizens trust a particular risk
management organization if they feel that the organization's priorities in
approaching and solving a problem (salient values) are similar to their own.
Based on shared salient values, they entrust the organization with decision-making
power.
In contrast to the traditional social psychological model, the key feature of the
SVS model is that it explains trust in situations with insufficient clues for a person
to evaluate the competence or benevolence/integrity of another person or an
organization. When people cannot directly confirm the competence or benevo-
lence/integrity of others, they focus on similarity in salient values. If they conclude
that similarity exists, they will “entrust” these others with decision making.
The SVS model is entirely different from the traditional social psychological
model in that, rather than competence and benevolence/integrity being treated as
antecedents of trust, perception of SVS increases trust, leading to increased percep-
tion of competence and benevolence/integrity. Many empirical risk management
studies have supported the SVS model (Earle and Cvetkovich
1997
; Siegrist and
Cvetkovich
2000
; Siegrist et al.
2001
,
2003
,
2005
; Earle
2004
; Poortinga and
Pidgeon
2006
). Furthermore, direct comparisons of the SVS and traditional social
psychological models in the area of risk management have indicated that the SVS
model fits the data better than the traditional social psychological model
(Cvetkovich and Nakayachi
2007
).
The SVS model of trust can be applied to trust building in e-commerce, where
information on competence and benevolence/integrity is not easily transmitted. As
discussed above, it can be difficult for users to gather information about the
competence and benevolence/integrity of an e-commerce website when they decide
whether to trust it. Given these social uncertainties surrounding the trustworthiness
