Research on the Acceptance Mechanism and Gender Differences in Urban Air Mobility in China Based on an Extended Technology Acceptance Model

As a potential contributor to urban sustainability, the commercialization of Urban Air Mobility depends on social license rather than mere technical feasibility. To address the limitations of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in high-risk contexts, this study integrates trust, perceived risk, personal innovativeness, and governance expectation to construct an extended acceptance model tailored to China’s policy-driven institutional environment. Based on 567 valid samples analyzed via Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Multi-Group Analysis (MGA), the results reveal three core mechanisms. First, perceived risk positively enhances perceived usefulness (β = 0.765, p < 0.001) via risk-induced cognitive reframing, indicating that the public rationalizes threats by amplifying the technology’s functional value. Second, trust exhibits a strong compensatory effect on perceived ease of use (β = 0.885, p < 0.001) and directly drives behavioral intention (β = 0.549, p < 0.001), serving as a heuristic to reduce perceived complexity in risky decisions. Third, governance expectation directly drives behavioral intention (β = 0.225, p = 0.004) and attitude (β = 0.201, p = 0.007), confirming the primacy of institutional trust in China. The model explains 50.5% of the variance in behavioral intention (R2 = 0.505) and 48.6% in attitude (R2 = 0.486). Notably, the direct effects of perceived ease of use on intention were non-significant, redefining TAM boundaries where safety supersedes efficiency. Finally, gender moderates the covariance between innovativeness and governance expectation (female β = 0.765 vs. male β = 0.720, C.R. = 3.196, p = 0.001), revealing higher institutional dependency among females. These findings elucidate the risk–trust institution nexus in UAM, offering empirical evidence for differentiated sustainable transport policies and marketing strategies.