Trust in systems: identification of 17 unresolved research questions and the highlighting of inconsistencies

Trust is perhaps one of the most important constructs when trying to understand human interactions with systems. As such, there has been a considerable amount of research done on factors such as individual differences in trust, environmental factors affecting trust, and even ‘contagion’ effects of trust. However, there still exists many inconsistencies in the literature that need to be resolved. This manuscript attempts to highlight some of these inconsistencies. This is done to highlight research questions which must be answered by the field. Prioritizing these questions will mitigate the risk of current research efforts being wasted. We used Hoff and Bashir’s (2015 Hoff, K. A., and M. Bashir. 2015. “Trust in Automation: Integrating Empirical Evidence on Factors That Influence Trust.” Human Factors 57 (3): 407–434. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720814547570[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) model consisting of learned trust, situational trust, and dispositional trust to structure our review wherein we identified research gaps and discrepancies in the trust in systems literature. Our review contains 17 research questions that will need to be answered before researchers understand how users form trust in systems. Finally, we propose 3 questions that researchers should ask in every study which may help mitigate some of these issues in the future.