Building Confidence in a World of Eroding Trust

Abstract

Trust is an important pillar in digital transformation. It is the key to fostering effective communications and collaborations. It is the foundational element that exists in the interactions between humans and technologies. However, the rapid innovation of technologies has accelerated their widespread exploitation, resulting in trust relationships among people and technologies becoming increasingly complex. In this age of eroding trust, exploring how to steer away from this trend towards sustaining and enhancing trust becomes critical. Through our review of the varying definitions and applications of trust in existing literature, we believe that there is another perspective to address the challenges of trust. In our article, we propose a trust pyramid to investigate the causality factors that influence the decision to trust. We classify the trust pyramid into three classifications (Foundational, Supplemental, and Innovative) according to the order of importance and deliberations. Within each classification, we also propose the causality factors that serve as key trust elements to influence any decision-making. We identify key challenges (e.g., the need for ethical technologies, regulations to keep pace with technological advancement) and address them by proposing viable initiatives that stakeholders can consider to build trust in a systematic manner.