A Cognitive Process Model of Trust Change

This paper describes a new process theory model of how trust in a technology changes over time. It proposes that trust change occurs after people pay attention to an event, make sense of it, and pass a threshold for changing their trust level. We call these the cognitive gears of trust. We extend the model with two variance theory factors—perceived technology risk and loyalty to the technology vendor— which should also affect how trust changes over time. Using hierarchical linear modeling we analyze data from 1799 respondents who report their trust after seeing eight successive news briefs about the technology. We find the effects on trust change of three cognitive processes—attention, sensemaking, and threshold as well as two factors—tech risk and loyalty

Paying Attention to News Briefs about Innovative Technologies

News sources about innovative technologies like Google’s driverless car and Apple’s Siri feature can help potential users evaluate the benefits and risks involved. However, individuals must pay attention to this information before they can make sense of it, and decide to change their technology trusting intention. While other fields investigate attention, no research to date has investigated why people pay attention to news briefs about innovative technologies. We propose four factors based on information processing theory. An exploratory study in which respondents are given a series of news briefs and asked how much they paid attention to them and why, provides support for four of our eight propositions. We find the strongest reasons for paying attention/(disregarding) the news briefs are the positive/(negative) nature of the news brief content characteristics. However, the biggest changes in trust are from positive and negative technology involvement factors