"Seeing Is Not Believing But Interpreting", Inducing Trust Through Institutional Symbolism: A Conceptual Framework for Online Trust Building in a Web Mediated Information Environment

Trust has become an essential prerequisite for customer relationship building. Implementing institutional mechanisms seems to be an obvious outcome in inducing trust, rather than the result of independently motivated decisions of the user's interpretation on the institutional design features to be trustworthy. Proponents of this idea argued by understanding the concept of a sign and its related properties, it is possible to improve the analysis and design of interface design elements within web environment to induce trust. Drawn from established theoretical work on institutional based trust and semiotic, the concept of Institutional Symbolism and its four underlying dimensions are proposed to facilitate thinking and perception as to how trust can be built through signs comprehension. Conceptualized in the context of web mediated information environment, the implications of these dimensions on web site design and future work is further discussed.

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