The Role of Familiarity or Experience in Generating Trust and in Its Impact on Continued Use

The fall in citizens' trust in public institutions is one of the biggest challenges they face. Among the formulae put forward to set this right is the role played by transparency yet, although initially it was considered that simply rolling out transparency programmes would lead to the intended outcome, subsequently several works established the non-existence of this relationship or even a decrease in citizens' trust. One possible explanation for such disparate consequences could be the way in which familiarity or experience affects trust-generating processes. For this reason, this research seeks to analyse, for the case of the UNED, the largest university institution in Spain, the impact that familiarity or user experience has on the relationship between transparency and trust and between this and continued use.