Many studies, including the Edelman Trust Barometer (the 13th annual global survey of trust in 26 countries) have found that with greater levels of trust, there are greater levels of customer engagement. In today’s blog entry, I will talk about how neuroscience helps us understand user trust and engagement. Paul J. Zak, a neuro-economist at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, found that countries with high trust levels are the most economically thriving ones. In an experiment that measured the hormone oxytocin, the researchers found that when participants felt that they were trusted, their brains subsequently produced more oxytocin. As participants were shown increased levels of trust, their brain augmented oxytocin production. But even more significantly, as oxytocin levels rose in participants, their behavior became more trustworthy. The researchers deduced that people who feel trusted become more trustworthy as a result of increased oxytocin levels in their brains. You may have seen oxytocin referred to as “the love hormone”, since studies have shown that levels increase when people hug or are intimate with a loved one. But in Zak’s study, he additionally identified oxytocin as “the trust molecule”.
There are differences in brain activity depending on whether people trust conditionally or unconditionally, however both involve areas associated with reward and reinforcement. If people trust each other conditionally, such as when a person keeps their word about an obligation, the brain’s reward center, the VTA ( vental tegmental area) activates. (You may remember that I mentioned this area in my second blog post on the dopaminergic and reward system.) In contrast, unconditional trust activates the septal nuclei, structures that lie below the rostrum of the corpus callosum (the neural fibers that connect the left and right cerebral hemispheres), and these septal areas are also associated with reward and reinforcement. Zak and his team also looked into what happened when male participants are distrusted and it causes a rise in the levels of a hormone called dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Increased levels of DHT cause an increase in the desire for physical aggression in taxing social situations. As someone with a scientific background, I should probably mention that the results for women were inconclusive. However, for both men and women, high levels of trust are associated with decreased amygdala activity (I refer back to my first blog entry for more on the amygdala) and low measures of fear. But when there is distrust, the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain associated with decision-making and emotion, activates the amygdala. Fear increasingly activates the amygdala and trust decreases activation. If you take this conclusion further, trust essentially frees up the brain for other activities like planning and decision-making. If your website inspires trust, users will have more brain power to focus on the content of your site.
So what are some ways to increase trust in your design? One of the first and most obvious is to create a visual design with a professional appearance, but many companies neglect this. A five-year-old web design not only looks less professional, it may actually look like a scam website. Speaking of scams, many users are getting increasingly savvy about protecting their data when they surf the web. For instance, if they are filling out credit card numbers or banking information, they know that the website should be secured with a SSL certificate. Also, users have learned that if the URL of the webpage begins with “https” then an encrypted connection is being used and information is more likely to be safe. But it’s not just financial details that need to be protected on your site. Keeping users well-informed about how their information will be used seems obvious, but is often disregarded. For instance, will the website share the user’s email address or personal details? Will signing up for a newsletter also sign them up for spam? Your web design should be clear about how it uses user information and match user expectations for protecting their data. Finally, I will discuss trust, as it relates to reviews. People don’t trust reviews that are 100% positive or 100% negative. App ratings and book reviews with 3-star or 4-star ratings actually see increased sales. Users feel that a 5-star rating is too good to be true. And companies that respond to negative feedback gracefully in public, rather than sweeping it under the carpet, build more trust than they could with purely positive feedback.
These are just a few tips on increasing trust in your website. Creating trust has been shown to have a snowball effect. Getting users to trust you, in turn raises your oxytocin levels, causing you to become more trustworthy and this positive cycle continues. For more information on the neuroscience of engagement, this video refers to line manager-employee relationships, but also includes some interesting neuroscience principles of engagement. And here is Zak’s Ted talk video about his work.