Intuition, risk, and the formation of online trust

Understanding how consumers evaluate website trustworthiness is a critical factor for online vendors. The dominant view espouses a deliberative trust formation process whereby shoppers evaluate security certificates, return policies, user feedback and the like, implying a highly rational underlying trust calculus. In this paper we use a laboratory experiment to explore an alternative perspective, based on the non-rational associative reasoning approach. Our findings show that when faced with a no-risk hypothetical decision about whether or not they would purchase a book from an online bookseller, subjects' decision-making processes were indeed consistent with the dominant deliberative view. However, when confronted with a decision entailing risk (i.e., sharing sensitive personal information with an unknown website), subjects became reliant on their non-rational, gut-level intuition. We adopt a dual-process reasoning theory to make sense of these findings, and recommend that vendors take into account associative reasoning factors when designing online interfaces. Future research directions are provided.