Reviewing the Case of Online Interpersonal Trust

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to better qualify the problem of online trust. The problem of online trust is that of evaluating whether online environments have the proper design to enable trust. This paper tries to better qualify this problem by showing that there is no unique answer, but only conditional considerations that depend on the conception of trust assumed and the features that are included in the environments themselves. In fact, the major issue concerning traditional debates surrounding online trust is that those debates focus on specific definitions of trust and specific online environments. Ordinarily, a definition of trust is assumed and then environmental conditions necessary for trust are evaluated with respect to such specific definition. However, this modus operandi fails to appreciate that trust is a rich concept, with a multitude of meanings and that there is still no strict consensus on which meaning shall be taken as the proper one. Moreover, the fact that online environments are constantly evolving and that new design features might be implemented in them is completely ignored. In this paper, the richness of the philosophical discussions about trust is brought into the analysis of online trust. I first provide a set of conditions that depend on the definition of trust that can be assumed and then discuss those conditions with respect to the design of online environments in order to determine whether they can enable (and under which circumstances) trust.