Modeling the antecedents of system trust

Although many have studied the effects of outcome feedback on system trust, little is known about the formation of trust when such unequivocal information is absent. Such situations presumably cause users to rely on less concrete information, such as information from others, and process feedback. The aim of this paper is to establish the effects of these types of information, and to apply the Heuristic-Systematic Model to model how such sources may affect trust in a route planner. An experiment was conducted to test the effects of heuristic cues (consensus information) and process feedback (consistent versus random) on system trust. Results show that consensus information is used at least initially to form trust in a route planner. Random process feedback was shown to have an additive effect on trust. Consistent process feedback, however, was shown to attenuate the effect of negative consensus information. 1.