research-article

What does it mean to trust facebook?: examining technology and interpersonal trust beliefs

Authors:

Nancy K. Lankton,

D. Harrison McKnightAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems, Volume 42, Issue 2

Pages 32 - 54

https://doi.org/10.1145/1989098.1989101

Published: 24 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Researchers have recently studied technology trust in terms of the technological artifact itself. Two different kinds of trusting beliefs could apply to a website artifact. First, the trusting beliefs may relate to the interpersonal characteristics--competence, integrity, and benevolence. Second, they may relate to corresponding technology characteristics--functionality, reliability, and helpfulness. Since social networking websites like Facebook may demonstrate either interpersonal or technology trust characteristics, researchers may need to carefully choose the beliefs to model. Thus it is important to understand not only the conceptual meaning of these beliefs, but also whether human and technology trust beliefs are distinct. Using data collected from 362 university-student Facebook users, we test two second-order factor structures that represent alternative ways to model the three interpersonal and three technology trust beliefs. We find that the best-fitting measurement model depicts the three conceptually-related pairs of trust beliefs (competence-functionality, integrity-reliability, and benevolence-helpfulness) as three distinct second-order factors. This model outperformed the model splitting trusting beliefs into separate interpersonal and technology second-order factors. The results show people distinguish among three types of conceptually-related trust attributes, and that they trust Facebook as both a technology and a quasi-person. These second-order trust factors can be used in future research to better understand social networking trust and usage continuance intentions

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Index Terms

What does it mean to trust facebook?: examining technology and interpersonal trust beliefs
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Personal computers and PC applications

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cover image ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems

ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems Volume 42, Issue 2

May 2011

107 pages

ISSN:0095-0033

EISSN:1532-0936

DOI:10.1145/1989098

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Copyright © 2011 Authors.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 24 May 2011

Published in SIGMIS Volume 42, Issue 2

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Brunswicker SZhang YRashidian CLinna D(2025)Trust through words: The systemize-empathize-effect of language in task-oriented conversational agentsComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2024.108516165(108516)Online publication date: Apr-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2024.108516
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