The Mediating Effect Of Group Convergence Between Network Consumer Interaction And Consumers’ Initial Trust

The initial trust is the premise of consumers’ adoption, the fundamental question of how to make the consumers develop with initial trust becomes a recently researched topic in both academics and practice.Current researches regarding the mechanisms of initial trust formation take the perspectives of enterprises(or websites), online shopping, or payment security and usually ignore the relationship within consumers. In the era of Web 2.0, online interactions between consumers have become a necessary event of social interactions and could have deep impacts on consumers’ psychology and adoption.This thesis focused on the social interactions to explore the effects of consumer groups’ interactions on their initial trust. Based on the literatures, this thesis explores the ways to increase the positive interactions, cohesions, and experience among consumers and, by doing so, to increase the initial trust toward brand websites or products and to build a model from the perspective of consumers that can explain the mechanisms of initial trust. The proposed model, based on the framework of S-O-R theory, put the online consumers’ interactions as stimulus(S), the convergence effects of organism(O), and the initial trust as response(R), to analyze the relationships among online interactions, convergence, and initial trust.This thesis applies the approaches of experiment and survey and the results show that the only hypothesis that cannot be testified is the effect of product interactions on emotional convergence under the weak ties; the positive effects of product interaction and inter-personal interactions on cognitive convergence and emotional convergence are all testified; there are positive effects of consumers’ cognitive convergence and emotional convergence on consumers’ initial trust.