Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 56, March 2016, Pages 34-44
Computers in Human Behavior

Literature review
Understanding the effects of trust and risk on individual behavior toward social media platforms: A meta-analysis of the empirical evidence

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.11.011Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Trust and risk both had significant effects on individual behavior toward SMPs.

  • Trust had a stronger effect on individual behavior toward SMPs than risk.

  • Moderating effects of trust objects and platform types were found.

  • The moderating effect of culture was not supported by the meta-analysis.

  • Measurements of trust and risk in the previous IS research were summarized.

Abstract

Trust and risk have been theorized and empirically approved as the most influential factors affecting individual behavior toward social media platforms (SMPs). However, the evidence is scattered and the understanding of the effects is ambiguous. To address this problem, a rigorous and quantitative meta-analysis was conducted to investigate the empirical evidence of 43 studies in information systems research between 2006 and 2014. The findings suggested that trust and risk both had significant effects on individual behavior toward SMPs but that trust had a stronger effect. Moderating effects of trust objects (community members vs. platforms) and platform types (virtual communities vs. social networking sites) were found. Surprisingly, culture was found to exert no moderating effect. This paper contributes more generalized knowledge to social media research literature to the theory with regard to the influence of trust and risk on individual behavior toward SMPs. The knowledge serves as the foundation for future research efforts in social media. Implications for practice are discussed.

Introduction

Since the first social media platform (SMP), SixDegrees.com, was launched in 1997, a rapid proliferation of SMPs has been seen (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). SMPs are established to facilitate communications and promote interactions that enable the individuals to manage both personal networks and their relationships with business. As more and more individuals rely increasingly on social media in conducting different activities, SMPs have developed as anchor points of the Internet where content and data is aggregated. This has created challenges for business and SMPs providers. Most of business, who have little knowledge or prior experiences of exploring the new medias, should pay more attention to SMPs to continue developing their brand, their relationship with individual users and consumers. By increasing the engagements in SMPs, businesses gain more capability to keep in touch with their consumers and fulfill their needs and requests. For SMPs providers, they need to build up the platform for mediating the communication and relationship managements between the individuals and businesses; they need to sustain the development and economic growth of the SMPs. Therefore, it has become essential to understand the factors that are driving different types of individual behaviors toward SMPs. Business is in great need for understanding these factors for fully exploiting the potentials of SMPs. SMPs providers desire to understand the factors and mechanisms that have impact on individual behavior, which would produce more insights on improving the platforms technically, and at the same time, to gain more power in economic activities in the new digital age (Casaló, Flavián, & Guinalíu, 2008).

However, the influencing factors on individual behavior toward SMPs remain poorly understood in information systems (IS) research, even though a growing amount of research has been conducted (see appendix). The factors such as trust, risk, social tie, social norm, culture, gender, perceived usefulness or ease of use are generally tested in the existing studies, but with varying and fragmented results (Chai et al., 2011, Hsiao and Chiou, 2012, Hu et al., 2011, Ng, 2013). Consequently, these results bring less value for business and SMPs providers alike to understand these factors and on how to act on these results. In order to obtain better understanding of the influencing factors on individual behavior toward SMPs, and exact more valuable insights for business and SMPs providers, a generalized and deep study of these factors is demanding. Among these factors which are investigated in IS research, trust and risk are the two most frequently studied and empirically approved to be most important and significant factors in influencing individual behaviors toward SMPs (Bélanger and Crossler, 2011, Ou et al., 2014, Porter and Donthu, 2008).

Even though trust and risk are important for understanding individual behavior, different measurements for trust and risk behavior are used in IS literature (see appendix). This produces inconsistent results across studies, thus hindering our generalized understanding of these two concepts and the effect on individual behavior. Moreover, the effects of the two factors on behavior vary for different type of SMPs, e.g., social networking sites and virtual communities. Individuals also carry out different behaviors (e.g. adoption, purchasing, or knowledge sharing) at different SMPs. Notably, in contrast to studies on trust and risk in a traditional e-commerce context, relatively less research on SMPs is conducted (Kim et al., 2008, Pavlou, 2003). In order to address these issues, the objective of this paper is to conduct a meta-analysis of literature with regard to the two factors and their effects on individual behavior toward SMPs. We aim to explore the complexity of this research field and generalize knowledge that future research can be built upon.

In this paper, three research questions are being explored:

RQ1

What are the relationships among trust, risk and different types of individual behaviors toward SMPs, e.g. adoption, purchasing, and sharing behaviors?

RQ2

Do the strengths of the relationships differ for different types of individual behaviors toward SMPs, e.g. adoption, purchasing, and sharing behaviors?

RQ3

Do culture, trust objects, and platform type moderate the relationships of trust and risk on different type of individual behavior toward SMPs?

This meta-analysis generates better understanding of trust and risk, and their effects on different types of individual behaviors toward SMPs. Hence, this paper contributes more generalized knowledge to social media research to the theory with regard to the influence of trust and risk on individual behavior toward SMPs.

This paper is organized as follows. The next section presents the theoretical background. We then describe the research methodology. Furthermore, we summarize the results from the meta-analysis. At the end, the paper concludes with a discussion of the findings, contributions, research limitations and suggestions for future research.

Section snippets

Individual behavior on SMPs

SMPs are widely adopted by individuals across the world. From a technical perspective, SMPs have a set of different functionalities which include identity (e.g., self-presentation), conversations (e.g., communicate with others), sharing (e.g., knowledge exchange), presence (e.g., others' reality perception), relationships (e.g., related to others), reputation (e.g., social standing), and groups (e.g., form communities) (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). Each platform focuses on

Literature search

Meta-analysis has proven to be a useful technique in IS research to reflect upon what has been learned from previous studies; as well what impact can be made on future research efforts (Alavi & Joachimsthaler, 1992). We searched all 109 journals provided by MIS journal rankings (Association for Information Systems, 2014), conference proceedings of AIS and theses in ProQuest. Although SMPs were introduced as early as 1997, a surge in research began with Universal McCann's seminal paper in 2006

Characteristics of primary studies

Table 3 shows the descriptive statistics of the pairwise relationships identified in our meta-analysis. The relationships are clearly demonstrated between trust/risk and different types of individual behavior (i.e. adoption, purchase and sharing behavior). However, the sizes of the effects of the relationships vary across the studies. Trust is reported to have a magnitude as high as 0.67 in influencing adoption behavior. Risk has small effect on individual behavior toward SMPs, which ranges

Theoretical contributions

The principal goal of this study is to provide a meta-analysis of the effects of trust and perceived risk on three types of individual behavior toward SMPs and verify the moderators to better understand the relationships. There are a number of theoretical contributions of the research.

First, this study is the first meta-analysis in IS research with the aim of advancing the generalized understanding of the construct trust, perceived risk and their relationships with individual behaviors toward

Conclusion

Trust and risk are theorized and approved to have effects on individuals' behaviors toward SMPs. However, the empirical results are study-dependent and a more generic understanding of the effects/relationships is needed. This meta-analysis has shown that (1) across studies, trust and risk are conceptualized, measured, and operationalized differently; (2) trust and risk are both significantly correlated with individual behavior on SMPs, while the effect size of trust is stronger than for risk;

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the associate editor and the reviewers for their constructive comments in improving this paper. This work is supported by the grant of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71301021; 71431002).

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