Building Personalized Trust: Discovering What Makes One Trust and Act on Facebook Posts

Abstract

What makes one trust or distrust a post on Facebook? What makes one willing to take an action on the post, such as sharing it with friends, following its advice, or even making a donation for its cause? We hypothesize that personal factors in addition to the characteristics of a post would be associated with one's trust and willingness to take actions on the post. To test our hypothesis, we have examined the relationships between a wide variety of personal factors and how users perceived the credibility of a post on Facebook and their associated behavior—willingness to act on the post with the acceptance of potential risks. Our results from a study involving 400 participants reveal several new findings. Notably, beyond message properties, we have discovered that personal factors are significantly associated with how users perceived the credibility of Facebook posts. Not only do our findings extend prior work on studying the relationships between information properties and users' trust in Facebook posts, but they also indicate the potential of tailoring intended messages to an audience based on their personal factors for establishing desired trust. Moreover, we have found that a combination of personal factors is associated more with users' willingness to act on a post than their perceptions of credibility alone. This finding deepens the understanding of users' behavior on Facebook beyond learning their subjective perceptions. It also informs how to potentially tailor intended messages to an audience based on the audience's personal factors so that the audience can act on the messages beyond just perceiving the credibility of the messages. We also discuss the implications of our findings for building personalized trust between message authors and readers on Facebook and beyond.