The part of the external world, including users and inmates of the system that effects and is affected by the system.
Published in Chapter:
Trust Based E-Commerce Decisions
Vesile Evrim (University of Southern California, USA) and Dennis McLeod (University of Southern California, USA)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 10
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-857-4.ch022
Abstract
Over the years, trust has been extensively studied in many fields such as sociology, psychology, and economics. The sociologist Gambetta (2000) states that trust is one of the most important social concepts present in all human interaction and without it there is no cooperation or society. Berscheid (1994) also claims that trust is central to how we interact with each other; thus, it is a key to the positive interrelationships. Social psychologists use the notion of trust to predict acceptance of behaviors by others and institutions (e.g., government agencies). In literature, trust is defined in so many ways that it becomes more elusive than the physical dimensions of space and time. In time, due to the increase of human-computer interaction, trust has become one of the most challenging topics in computer science. Similar to the definitions of trust defined by sociologists and psychologists, computer scientists have also defined trust in their own way (McKnight & Chevany 1996; Falcone & Castelfranchi, 2001; Wang & Vassileva, 2003). How much we trust the source, information, or agent has become one of the hardest questions to answer. As computer technology advances, the need for trust between multiple parties in a communication-based systems increase.