What is it about?
This research looks at how people build trust online—especially when that trust leads to real-life decisions, like hiring a babysitter. We studied a popular UK childcare website to understand how online interactions and reviews help people decide who to trust. By combining psychology-based trust models with network and profile data, we created a way to measure trust—even for people who haven’t received any reviews yet.
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Why is it important?
Trust is the backbone of everything from hiring a babysitter to sharing a ride or renting a room. But online, we often have to decide who to trust without ever meeting them. This research helps us understand and measure trust in digital spaces—even when reviews are scarce—so we can make safer, smarter choices. It also shows how trust online connects to bigger things, like social capital and economic health.
Perspectives
This work bridges psychology, data science, and web technologies to rethink how we measure trust online. It opens up new ways to build safer, more reliable platforms—especially in areas where trust really matters, like childcare, healthcare, and the sharing economy. It also challenges the overreliance on reviews by offering a more nuanced, data-driven approach to understanding trust between strangers.
Ylli Prifti
Birkbeck University of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Trust Models Go to the Web: Learning How to Trust Strangers, ACM Transactions on the Web, March 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3715882.
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