Building trust in mobile medical consultations : the roles of privacy concerns, personality traits, and social cues

Abstract

It is increasingly popular to access health professionals through mobile medical consultations (MMCs). However, few studies on trust building during MMCs were found. To fill this gap, this study conducted an online survey study with 108 users of MMCs in China. We investigated the predictors of two types of trust (i.e., trust in physicians and trust in MMCs) by examining the influences of privacy concerns, personality traits, social presence of interaction, and social validation. The results indicated that intellect, privacy concerns, social presence of interaction, and social validation are the predictors of trust in physicians, while neuroticism, privacy concerns, and social presence of interaction are the predictors of trust in applications. The findings provided suggestions about how to build trust by considering privacy concerns and personality traits and highlighted the effects of social presence of interaction and social validation, which are interface features, on trust. Practically, this study also implied that practitioners and designers can apply different strategies to enhance trust in physicians and trust in applications in relation to MMCs.