Trust Decision-Making in Online Social Communities: A Network-Based Model

The unique characteristics of online social communities call for a reexamination and adaptation of established behavioral theories of trust decision-making. Guided by relevant social science and computational graph theories, we propose a conceptual model of trust decision-making in online social networks. This is the first study that integrates the existing graph-based view of trust decision-making in social networks into socio-psychological theories of trust to provide a richer understanding of trusting decisions in online social networks. We introduce new behavioral antecedents of trusting decisions, and redefine and integrate existing graph-based concepts to develop our proposed conceptual model. We introduce new behavioral antecedents of trusting decisions that have not been identified in previous research. We also identify novel operationalization methods to measure behavioral trust-inducing factors for online social networks. Our empirical findings indicate that both behavioral and network-specific trust decision-making factors should be considered in studying trusting decisions in online social networks.