The Trust Foundation Understanding trust issues in the digital era.

"Should people who have done little or no business together trust one another? "

When people blog about issues of trust online, the dialogue and debate often turns into an exchange of personal opinion rather than an objective analysis of solid facts. This post is the first in a series of posts on exciting findings about trust identified via actual trust research conducted at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

The leading business school publishes an online business journal, Knowledge@Wharton, to share the intellectual capital of their distinguished faculty and researchers with the world, and I'll be highlighting the best trust-related posts in this posts and future posts to come, tagged with "knowledge@wharton". I hope to also bring the perspective of other leading research institutions to the table.

Digging into the archives, we begin with a look at "Should You Ever Trust a Stranger?" (Sep. 28, 2000), which summarizes a cross-disciplinary study, entitled "Trust Building Among Strangers: An Experimental Investigation of Mutual Trust and Trustbuilding", headed by Teck-Hua Ho of Wharton’s marketing department and Keith Weigelt of Wharton's management department.

The researchers set up a game to study how users demonstrated trusting behavior and trustworthiness in the absence of pre-existing relationships. One of the most intriguing findings of their study is that complete strangers were able to build trust with and trust each other; the ones who built trust most successfully made their intentions clear. Weigelt says, "As long as you demonstrate your intentions, people are willing to trust you. This is particularly important in the case of people you have not dealt with before."

These observations are particularly important for understanding trust on the web. In the words of the article author, the decrease in face-time due to the Internet, "increases the need for alternative trust-building mechanisms."

How do you demonstrate your intentions as a trustworthy individual or trustworthy organization online?