The mechanics of trust: A framework for research and design

Abstract

With an increasing number of technologies supporting transactions over distance and replacing traditional forms of interaction, designing for trust has become a core concern for researchers in both HCI and CMC. While much research focuses on increasing trust in mediated interactions, this paper takes a systemic view to identify the factors that support trustworthy behavior. In a second step, we analyze how the presence of these factors can be signaled to allow the formation of well-placed trust. For our analysis we draw on relevant research from sociology, economics, and psychology, as well as empirical findings in HCI and CMC research. The key factors that warrant trust in another actor are contextual properties (temporal, social, and institutional embeddedness) and the trusted actor's intrinsic properties (ability and motivation). In first interactions, trust is mainly warranted by contextual properties, as they provide external incentives and threat of punishment. As interactions are repeated over time and trust grows, intrinsic properties become more important. To increase the level of well-placed trust, researchers and designers need to identify signals for the presence of such trust-warranting properties that are reliable and easy to interpret. At the same time, they must be cheap to emit for actors whose actions are governed by them but costly to mimic for untrustworthy actors. Our analysis provides a frame of reference for the design of studies on trust in technology-mediated exchanges, as well as a guide for identifying trust requirements in design processes. We demonstrate application of the model in three scenarios: ecommerce, voice-enabled online gaming, and ambient technologies.

Interactive Reputation Systems

“…While the emergence of the Internet and e-commerce is a quite recent phenomenon, the research on trust spans a wide area of further disciplines such as sociology, psychology or economics (Riegelsberger et al 2005). Consequently, there are just as many definitions and researchers even disagree on basic characteristics (McKnight and Chervany 1996;Gefen et al 2003).…”

Identifying risk and mitigating gambling-related harm in online poker

“…In terms of e--commerce, and with particular reference to online gambling, it is widely recognised that customer service in terms of meeting customer needs and alleviating difficulties (Phillips et al, 2013) and subsequent trustworthiness (Riegelsberger et al, 2005;Wood & Griffiths, 2008) increase the likelihood of a customer using that company (Lee et al, 2014). Research has previously demonstrated that customers perceive online gambling operators' attempts to reduce player gambling--related harm positively, and beyond more favourable attitudes can lead to an increase in desire and intention to gamble with that operator (Song et al, 2012;Wood & Griffiths, 2008).…”

On Designing Usable Policy Languages for Declarative Trust Aggregation

“…We refer to the extant literature, see for example [13] and [4], for a more thorough discussion of trust mechanisms and their role in general system design. Empirical work done by social scientists in the general space of trust perceptions and its support in decision making is an important source of information for the design of user-facing trust aggregation languages.…”