The Effects of Trust-Assuring Arguments on Consumer Trust in Internet Stores: Application of Toulmin's Model of Argumentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A trust-assuring argument refers to “a claim and its supporting statements used in an Internet store to address trust-related issues.” Although trust-assuring arguments often appear in Internet stores, little research has been conducted to understand their effects on consumer trust in an Internet store. The goals of this study are (1) to investigate whether or not the provision of trust-assuring arguments on the website of an Internet store increase consumer trust in that Internet store and (2) to identify the most effective form of trust-assuring arguments to provide guidelines for their implementation. Toulmin's (1958) model of argumentation is proposed as a basis to identify the elements of an argument and to strengthen the effects of trust-assuring arguments on consumer trust in an Internet store. Based on Toulmin's (1958) model of argumentation, three elements of arguments that commonly appear in daily communication; namely, claim, data, and backing, are identified. Data refers to the grounds for a claim, while backing is used for providing reasons for why the data should be accepted. By combining these three elements, three forms of trust-assuring arguments (claim only, claim plus data, and claim plus data and backing) are developed. The effects of these three forms of trust-assuring arguments on consumer trust in an Internet store are tested by comparing them to a no trust-assuring argument condition in a laboratory experiment with 112 participants. The results indicate (1) providing trust-assuring arguments that consist of claim plus data or claim plus data and backing increases consumers' trusting belief but displaying arguments that contain claim only does not and (2) trust-assuring arguments that include claim plus data and backing lead to the highest level of trusting belief among the three forms of arguments examined in this study. Based on the results, we argue that Toulmin's (1958) model of argumentation is an effective basis for website designers to develop convincing trust-assuring arguments and to improve existing trust-assuring arguments in Internet stores.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.094 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".