Trusting me, Trusting you - Trusting Technology? A Multidisciplinary Analysis to Uncover the Status Quo of Research on Trust in Technology

Distel B, Engelke K. M., Querfurth, S.

Abstract

Trust has been proposed as a central mechanism to deal with risks brought about by the rapid and ubiquitous proliferation of technologies. Only recently, the notion of technology trust has emerged, i.e. the trust individuals, groups, and organisations have in a technology. This article seeks to uncover and structure the status quo of scientific research on trust in technology. This endeavour is carried out in two subsequent steps. First, we apply a text mining analysis to articles dealing with trust and technology. Second, we perform a literature review on a sample drawn from the first study that deals explicitly with trust in technologies. The result indicates that trust in technologies is only a sub-field of research on trust and technologies, that distrust is discussed to a far lesser degree than trust, and that research on trust in technologies, so far, lacks a common theoretical foundation. This article presents a comprehensive, multi-method review of existing literature on trust in the context of technologies and of trust in technology. The thorough in-depth analysis of articles allows to derive a meaningful research agenda.