Investigating The Antecedents Of Trust Crisis And The Coping Mechanism In Citizen Science Projects

In the past,scientific researches have always been regarded as the work of scientists.However,with the diversification and complication of scientific research,the concept of“public science” has gradually made people realized that many time-consuming and laborious research processes will become simple and efficient with public participation,and even achieve better results than expected,reflecting the importance of crowd intelligence.In fact,public science projects involve a lot of participants like scientists,public participants,project initiatives,website designers and so on,and effective cooperation among them is the key to the smooth development of the project.Previous literature focused on the motivations of public participation,but neglected an important prerequisites for effective cooperation,trust.Therefore,this study mainly investigate the problem of trust in public science projects,including the antecedents of trust and corresponding strategies to improve trust.In specific,this paper first introduces the research status of public science,trust,etc.,and summarizes the factors affecting trust from four aspects: individual,scientist,website and project.Subsequently,the author analyzes the current state of the trust crisis in public science projects and demonstrates the impact of the trust crisis on public science projects,thus establishing the links between the internal and external aspects of public science project elements,trust crisis and participation.Then,this paper combines the classic TBM trust theory model to establish an empirical model.Through a contextual questionnaire survey method,it clarifies and confirms the factors affecting public trust in public science projects from four aspects: reputation,website quality,information quality and institutional structure.Furthermore,this paper verifies the impact of trust on willingness to participate,which demonstrates the mediating role of trust.Thus,the trust model of public science projects are improved.Finally,based on the actor network theory,the author analyzes the results of semi-structured interviews and concludes both human actors and non-human actors in the trust mechanism network in public science projects,analyzes the obstacles and pofits encountered by these actors in the implementation process,and obtain the obligatory passage point.In the end,this paper concludes the strategies to deal with the trust crisis from the initiator’s reputation,website quality,information interactivity,privacy protection,find out the measures to deal with the trust crisis,finally establishes a completed trust mechanism.