title: The effect of culture and language on initial trust: a social semiotic view
Creators: name: Li, Enyun
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2020

description: Initial trust happens naturally at the initial stage before or just after two strangers meet. It is highly associated with trustors’ disposition to trust and relevant information discovered at the initial stage. Culture is significant in shaping human disposition to trust and affecting the way human interpret information, thus significant in initial trust. At present, studies of initial trust mainly focus on the factors that affect initial trust in e-business context. A few studies investigate the level of initial trust in different cultures but do not explore the cultural factors and reasons that result in the cultural differences in initial trust. This research intends to further study the cultural effect on initial trust and explore the reasons that result in the effect. British culture and Chinese culture are different. It assumes that people living in the UK and China have different level of initial trust, but there are few such investigations. This research first investigates whether people living in UK and China have different initial trust, then identifies what cultural factors impact people’s initial trust and explores why the factors affect initial trust. Culture is related to everything shared in a community or group and is constructed on the basis of meaning in social process. Social semiotics study meaning in social dimensions and view culture as a social construct. It is the theoretical background of this research to study the cultural effect on initial trust. This research adopts pragmatist paradigm and mixed-method research. Abductive reasoning was used to interpret the findings from the studies. A series of questionnaires were designed and conducted to collect data. First, a questionnaire with both closed and open-ended questions was designed to investigate whether people living in the UK and China had different initial trust in a business context. The responses were collected from university students who were studying in the UK and China. The results identified that the respondents’ initial trust was different between the two countries. An important finding was that a group of Chinese students who came to the UK recently showed similar initial trust level with the British students studying in the UK but had different initial trust level from the Chinese students studying in China. The reason for the difference was attributed to the different languages (Chinese and English) the respondents used in the investigation. This implied that language affects people’s initial trust and the cultural effect on initial trust might be associated with language used in the culture. To confirm the implications, people’s initial trust in Chinese and English was investigated by using the same questionnaire as that in study 1. We focused on Chinese university students studying in China. One group answered the questions in Chinese while the other one answered the questions in English. The group who answered questions in English had different level of initial trust from the group in Chinese and showed similar level of initial trust as that of British people in UK. The results confirmed that language had an effect on people’s initial trust and suggested that the cultural effect on initial trust in British culture and Chinese culture was highly associated with the language used in the culture. From a social semiotic perspective, the potential reasons for the effect of language on initial trust were attributed to the different semantic systems of Chinese and English. The lexicogrammatical meaning and affectual meaning of words in Chinese and English were studied. The results suggested the lexicogrammatical and affectual meaning of words in the two languages had limited effect on the different initial trust in Chinese and English. Based on the internal stratification and strata realisation between lexicogrammar and semantics, the mechanism of language that impacts initial trust was attributed to the natural logic of language that underpins the meaning at the syntactic-semantic interface between wording and meaning. The research finds that culture and language have an effect on initial trust, the cultural effect on initial trust is highly associated with language used in the culture and the natural logic of language plays a significant role in affecting initial trust in different languages. It implies that language is significant in shaping human thinking, affecting the way human interpret information and influencing people’s decisions in a foreign language. This research extends the study of culture and trust, provides new approach to initial trust, contributes to the study of human information interaction by providing new perspectives to understand the meaning base of information interface and makes contribution to trust management in business context. It also makes new contribution to the study of human judgement in a foreign language and extends the study of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This research focuses on British culture and Chinese culture and investigates initial trust in English and Chinese, limited in generalizing the outcomes into other contexts. In this research, it was difficult to find enough British people who were bilinguals of Chinese and English to investigate initial trust in Chinese and English, thus limited in verifying the outcomes in multi-ways