David Gefen, PhD (Editor)
Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Series: Psychology of Emotions, Motivations and Actions
BISAC: PSY013000

This book presents a series of new ideas in 16 chapters about trust in a variety of contexts and across disciplines. The chapters highlight the broad contexts to which trust research has been applied from e-commerce to online marketplaces, recommendation agents, school principals, project management, network security, trust games, investment in charitable organizations, and more. These varied contexts all show the same overall conclusion that trust is a central part of human decision making whether it applies to another person, social group, organization, unknown market players, or even technology artifacts. Importantly, the book shows how trust can be built, and how these antecedents apply, overlapping, across scenarios from online marketplaces to novice school principals to charitable organization, and to many other contexts.

In building this collection of chapters we included a variety of disciplines ranging from management, to management of information systems, to sociology and economics. The first eight chapters present new conceptual ideas about trust. Chapter one discusses the role of emotionally-calibrated trust regulation as revealed through a review in philosophy, psychology, and behavioral economists. Chapter two then discusses the role and importance of trust in managing public relations by organizations. Chapter three discusses how trust can be a strategic asset in organizations by creating dynamic capabilities. Chapter four augments the previous chapters by discussing the cognitive and emotional aspects of trust. Chapter five delves into a new perspective of trust, discussing its biology and neural correlates. Chapter six adds a gender aspect to trust, followed by a review of trust research in e-commerce and related contexts together with a discussion of whether it should be measured by reflective or by formative scales in Chapter seven.

The potential role of trust in network security is discussed in Chapter eight. The next eight chapters are empirical studies applying a variety of research methods. Chapter nine is a study of the importance of reported past trustworthiness in predicting the success, i.e. payment, of outsourced projects in online software markets based on archival panel data. The conclusions reveal that trustworthiness signals potential success but tells little of the risk of failure. Chapter ten summarizes a set of fascinating interviews with novice school principals to discover based on their experience what they used to successfully build trust. Chapter eleven also applies interviews in this case to discover new aspects that are not currently discussed in trust theory on how managers in large organizations build trust. Chapter twelve examines cognitive and affect trust in the context of technology artifacts recommendation agents in product selling websites. This chapter applies laboratory experiments to show the varying importance of brand familiarity and cognitive and affect trust.

Chapter thirteen applies survey research to study what builds trust in charitable organizations. Chapter fourteen examines the varying levels of trust in institutions across ASEAN cultures. Chapter fifteen examines the importance of social network density in a social capital view as revealed in an experimental trust game design. Chapter sixteen also applies an experimental design in this case to study the virtues of anonymity as revealed in a trust game across social groups. Combined, the empirical studies deal with many parts of the globe including the USA, Netherlands, China, ASEAN countries, Israel, Europe, and worldwide online marketplaces. While supporting existing theory on trust, these studies reveal many new aspects that could be the basis for new understanding on the meaning of trust, its applicability, and how to build it. (Imprint: Nova)