The relation between appeal and trust in web sites is complicated and quite poorly understood. One feasible way to better understand this relationship is that researchers should consider exploring the relation between appeal and distrust as well as appeal and trust.  Appeal judgments appear to be driven mostly by emotion (e.g. Lindgaard, Dudek & Sen, 2008), whereas trust has both a cognitive (belief) and an affective (value) component (Jarvenpaa, Knoll & Leidner, 1998; McAllister, 1995; Sitkin & Roth, 1993).  When people trust someone, they make a cognitive assessment (i.e., they expect a positive or a good outcome) (e.g., Bhattacharya, Devinney & Pillutla, 1998; Deutsch, 1973; Rouseau, Sitkin, Burt & Camerer, 1998).  The outcome could be negative, but the expectation is that it will be positive.  This expectation is associated with an emotion called hope (Held, 1968, citing Locke; Lewicki, McAllister & Bies, 1998).  Trust, therefore, can be conceptualized as a positive expectation coupled with the emotion of hope. 

Some authors believe that trust and distrust represent two distinct concepts (for details see Lewicki, et al., 1998; McKnight & Chervany, 2001; McKnight, Kacmar & Choudhury, 2002; Sitkin & Roth, 1993).  However, the underlying assumption is the same: trust involves an optimistic, and distrust a pessimistic, attitude.  Whereas trust is thus the belief that someone will do something good for you, distrust is the belief that someone will do you harm.  Thus, when people distrust, they expect a negative or unfavourable outcome (McKnight & Chervany, 2001), which is a cognitive assessment.  Distrust is usually accompanied by the emotion of fear (Held, 1968; Insko, Kirchner, Pinter, Efaw & Wildschut, 2005; Lewicki, et al., 1998).  

Peoples’ attitudes towards the concept of trust differ (Rotter, 1967), but most are predisposed to trust rather than to distrust (Baier, 1986; Bateson, 2000). This suggests that trust is the norm.  If emotion changes peoples’ attitudes, then an otherwise normal attitude of trust may change to distrust especially when fear is experienced.  Emotion may indeed play a bigger role in signaling distrust than trust (e.g. McAllister, 1995; Sitkin & Roth, 1995).  This is possibly because distrust is associated with perceived differences in values, whereas, trust is mostly associated with beliefs about performance (Sitkin & Roth, 1993).  Sitkin and Roth (1993) claim that when commitments are not fulfilled in a trust relationship, and the failure is attributed to insufficient task performance, then trust decreases.  However, if failure is attributed to a perceived moral deficiency of the trusted person, then distrust occurs, indicating that trust and distrust are fundamentally distinct concepts with differing antecedents.  For Sitkin and Roth (1993), trust appears to be similar to McAllister’s (1995) cognition-based version of trust because both are based on performance expectations.  Distrust is similar to McAllister’s (1995) affect-based trust because both are associated with the alignment of values.  Because they could be distinct concepts, they warrant separate investigation.  In this paper we describe how appeal, may be more associated with distrust than with trust because distrust, like appeal, may be guided primarily by emotive processes.