Emotional trust and cognitive distrust: From a cognitive-affective personality system theory perspective

Abstract

The objective of this research is to identify the role of trust and distrust in online shopping mall business. To differentiate the status of distrust from low trust, cognitive-affective personality system theory was applied, through which five types of psychological units were proposed. The research model proposed seven hypotheses showing the processes through which the features of an online shopping mall - truthfulness and effectiveness of the website - affect trust, distrust levels, and behavior of individual customers. Assuming that trust and distrust are in psychologically different stages, the study further proposed that distrust, which emerges and diminishes rather cognitively, is the antecedent of trust. Then trust, which emerges and diminishes as an emotion-based variable, is posited as the antecedent of customer loyalty. To validate, a survey was conducted with 310 Korean online shopping mall users. Results show that six out of seven hypotheses are supported. From the result, we draw following discussions. First, trust and distrust are different in terms of their psychological status, and trust seems to be the more critical factor in the online business context. Second, both effectiveness and truthfulness are found to be important sources of customer loyalty. However, unlike our expectation, only effectiveness showed a direct association with customer loyalty while truthfulness had an indirect impact through trust.