The Effect of Culture on Emotions and Trust of Websites

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of culture on the emotions invoked when different websites are viewed, and the perception of that website’s trustworthiness. Traditionally, researchers in the human computer interaction (HCI) field have focused on task-oriented usability, committed to improving efficiency. Eventually, the importance of other aspects of technology use was recognized, one of which were emotions, all grouped under the umbrella term user experience. Numerous studies show that culture has an influence on the user’s perception of usability and interface preferences. Seeing this relationship between culture and usability, one between culture and user experience remains to be explored. A survey was conducted as part of the methodology, where two cultural groups, Bosnians and the Chinese, participated with the aim of capturing differences and similarities in the perceptions of different classes of websites. The different types used are flashbased, text-dominated, combination of text and graphics, graphic-intensive and virtual reality. Two samples are culture-specific and the rest are either Australian or American. The study reveals the similarities and differences between the two cultural groups examined. Each cultural group rendered both positive and negative emotional responses from the survey and their perceptions of trustworthiness also varied.