Individual Assignment 1

I met a depressed but burned event in 2008. At that time, I loved a South Korea group named TVXQ for several years and they were announced to release their 4^th album at that year. Almost every fan club in China started to become the agency to sell Korean original albums to Chinese fans in that period of time. I chose a newly formed fan club(X fan club) to buy the Korean original album’s A version and B version through Internet. But half a year later, I didn’t receive remaining B version of the album yet. I connected with the webmaster several times and got the same answer that she would ask the person(C) who undertook to buy albums from South Korea. I didn’t believe I was been cheated until I found a post for discussion about C’s cheating records by fans from different fan clubs in a forum. Even though several person were been cheated, it’s hard to punish her in a legal way because we came from various places of China and the total money cannot be placed a case on file. It was such a huge shock for my heart that I went back to scan my blindness trust in the fan network.

Hurley (2006) defines trust as confident reliance on someone when you are in a position of vulnerability. As a student with less social experience and interest relationship in the past, I always tended to trust everyone. Thompson (2009) mentions that we like people whom we perceive to be similar to us because of similarity-attraction effect. As a fan of TVXQ, I often communicated with other fans from different backgrounds through the Internet on the basis of same faith. According to the similar favor, I trust all the fans with no difference. Therefore, when I found a way to purchase my albums from a fan club, the only thing I considered was to select one with smaller number in its name list so that I didn’t have to wait for a long time rather than the one with higher reputation but have so many people in front of me. But the truth is the more popular and bigger influence a fan club, the less probability of its moral issues. Hurley (2006) also describes that when people choose to trust, they have gone through a decision-making process and provides a model for trust with 3 decision-maker factors and 7 situational factors. As a risk avoider, I chose fan club since I give them more trust than mere business men in terms of identification-based trust (Thompson, 2009). And in the situation between I and X fan club, I thought we had common value (TVXQ) and aligned interest (enjoy TVXQ’s new songs and support their singing). What’s more, it became more reliable in my mind that there needed relatively strong interpersonal and financial capability to build and maintain a fan club through Internet. In fact, X fan club and C were just cooperative relationship. C is a business woman who cooperated with different fan clubs, she used to using all kinds of excuses to delay deliver goods or even disappearing after only sending small parts of goods. When we found she was a cheater, we couldn’t transfer debts to fan clubs because they remove the responsibility to C with the plea that our money was send to C’s personal account without the participation of fan clubs.

After that event, I realized that the trust cannot be given to each person especially in a virtual world. Building trust needs a deep though and consideration rationally and deliberately (Thompson, 2009).

References

Hurley, R. (2006). The Decision to Trust. Harvard Business Review, 84(9), 56-58

Thompson, L. (2009). The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall.