The Impact of the Number of Trusted Members on the Perceived Credibility of the Information on Social Commerce: The Mediating Roles of Cognitive Trust and Affective Trust

Abstract

With the advancement of internet technology, the transaction conducted via social commerce has become a trend. However, the credibility of social commerce is in doubt due to many fraudulent cases and scams being discovered frequently. Therefore, this study would like to evaluate the impacts of the number of trusted members, cognitive trust and affective trust on the perceived credibility on the information given on social media sites among the social commerce users in Malaysia. A total of 405 actual samples were collected and analyzed in this study. This research has contributed to the theoretical context by concluding that the number of trusted members, cognitive trust and affective trust have direct, positive, and significant effects on the perceived credibility; while the number of trusted members has direct, positive, and significant effect on both the cognitive trust and affective trust. Besides, the study also concluded two mediating hypotheses in which the cognitive trust mediates the relationship between the number of trusted members and perceived credibility as well as the affective trust mediates the relationship between the number of trusted members and perceived credibility.