Effect of Interpersonal Trust on Social Information Seeking

With information growing at an exponential pace the infor-mation access tools that have served us well in the past are now cracking under the weight of the Web. Social naviga-tion support in information space has been created as a re-sponse to the problem of disorientation in information space. Studies show the success of social navigation support in at-tracting users ’ attention and guiding them through complex information space. However little is known about how ef-fectiveness of social navigation support interact with indi-vidual or situational characteristics. The goal of this work is to study the effect of individual’s interpersonal trust level on social navigation support in the context of information seek-ing. The result of our study shows that users with different level of interpersonal trust follow social navigation support differently