Designing trust for a universal audience: a multicultural study on the formation of trust in the Internet in the Nordic Countries

This paper presents a multicultural comparison on users' perception on computer security issues in Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. Special emphasis is given to the notion of trust: how trusting relations are formed both in an electronic environment, namely, the Internet, as well as outside it, in the real world. A set of user interviews, together with walkthroughs of existing Web sites of some e-commerce service providers, were conducted in all these three countries, in order to track down how cultural variation might affect users' perception of computer security, as well as their trusting behaviour. The outcome of the study is an understanding that cultural variation indeed plays a major role in trust-forming, and that the online behaviour of the users representing these three Nordic countries was to some extent similar, but at some points quite dissimilar to one another.