Trust and Information-Taking Behavior in the Web Community

Abstract

In order to realize the double helix model for chance discovery, trust in both, objective data and subjective data, is indispensable. Trust would be the basis to construct and develop a new community in which people interact with each other. In the process for people to recognize and share trust, information might navigate them. This study aims at clarifying the significance and possibility of trust focusing on the Internet as a new community using data of questionnaire survey involving participants from Japan and the US. The main results are as follows: 1) the U.S. people have a strong tendency to gather information positively, to examine the trust in the objective data, to feel other trustworthiness as the basis of subjective data, and to output trust into the web community rather than the Japanese do, 2) human interaction in the web community is affected by the trust of individuals, 3) the levels of empathy, rationality, and recognition about profit of the Internet influence to the condition of trust.