Women Trust Others and Consensus; Men Trust Numbers and Their Own Judgment: A Conceptual Analysis of the Impact of the Self-Construal Mechanism on the Relationship between Online Feedback Mechanisms and Online Trust

The literature on self-construal has paid significant attention to the behavioral outcomes of independent and interdependent self-construal in different contexts, across gender or across cultures. Few studies, however, have explicitly examined the extent to which self-construal has an impact on the extent to which a consumer is influenced by online feedback mechanisms such as written post feedbacks or quantitative ratings in sequential order. In this study, a thorough literature review elaborates four research propositions that predict to what extent self-construal has an impact on the relationship between online feedback mechanisms and online trust, in the specific case of trust toward a peer who proposes collaborative consumption services (second-hand selling, product location, and bartering, among others). An explanation follows as to the predicted relationships in light of the semantic procedural interface that underlies the self-construal process. Potential theoretical and practical implications of presumably validated research propositions are also discussed.