Social categorization and trust generalization across digital self-representations

Webinar

Social categorization and trust generalization across digital self-representations

 21st November 2024, Thursday at 9am EST/3pm CET

Recent years have seen a surge in the use of avatars in virtual workplace interactions, resulting in strategic and organizational consequences that remain inadequately understood. We address this gap by examining whether trust is influenced by the trustee’s digital representation (human or avatar). Our theory suggests that the use of avatars has created a new social category that suffers from lower levels of trust than a human representation would, raising the question of whether trust generalizes across different digital representations of the same trustee. Conducting two online experiments using a trust game, we find that the human representation of a trustee elicits greater trust than the avatar representation, and that trust declines when switching from the human to avatar representation but not vice versa. Further results suggest that the perceived familiarity and similarity of the trustee’s digital representation causally mediate this asymmetric trust generalization, such that decline in trust when transitioning to an avatar representation holds only when the avatar seems unfamiliar and dissimilar. We discuss implications for theory and research on the development and maintenance of trust in virtual interactions and the importance of studying the effects of avatars on various work practices such as onboarding, training, remote collaboration, and customer interactions.

About the Speaker: 

Vivianna Fang He is an Associate Professor at the School of Management, University of St Gallen. She is the founding director of the Institute of Responsible Innovation—an interdisciplinary research centre focusing on innovative technologies and organizational forms for the societal good. Her research centres around collaboration in innovation-related contexts, including self-managing teams, online communities, and R&D processes. She publishes in leading academic journals such as Natural Reviews Drug Discovery, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Information Systems Review, and Academy of Management Annuals. Her research has won competitive grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Vivianna earned her PhD in Management from the George Washington University (Washington, D.C.) and worked at ETH (Zürich) and ESSEC Business School (Paris) prior to joining University of St. Gallen.

Hope you will be able to join us!