Abstract:

The concept of trust has widely discussed in existing literature. However, the distinction between cognitive and affective based trust received little attention for virtual environemts. This environments may offer the best practice of trust based activities. This is because interacting parties may never meet each other in their virtual interactions or at best limited. This study addressed the nature and functioning of trust to improve the delivery of task/service over relationship in virtual world environments. The trust literature suffers from a lack of theoretical integration between typologies of interaction in virtual world and type of trust in this environment. In this paper, we present theoretical model that drawn from the sociological literature on trust and the social psychological literature in virtual interactions. The correlations between typologies of interactions in virtual world context and the type of trust in virtual environments are discussed. Directions for future research are also presented.