Age and Trust in the Internet: The Centrality of Experience and Attitudes Toward Technology in Britain

The authors describe changes in user’s trust on the Internet in Britain between 2003 and 2009, and show how the relationship between age and trust can be explained by a combination of experience with the Internet and general attitudes toward technology. The comparison uses 2003 results reported by Dutton and Shepherd (2006) versus similarly sampled 2009 data. The authors examine two sets of dependent variables—perceptions of trust and risk on the Internet and use of the Internet for e-commerce, an anticipated impact of trust. The authors find that indicators of trust are related to experience with the technology, although this relationship is less important in 2009 than it was in 2003. The authors also find that trust is influenced by general attitudes toward technology. When both experience on the Internet and technology attitudes are controlled, the relation between indicators of trust and age disappears. This finding is particularly interesting since age is usually an important predictor of many aspects of the Internet; it suggests that the role of age can be mitigated by addressing the degree to which older individuals tend to have less experience with the Internet and more scepticism about the role of technology in society. Interventions could address both of these determinants of distrust.