Modern society faced various fears from risks, e. g., nuclear power energy. As the cyberspace has developed, internet users usually share their thoughts on risk issues. Distrust in information from internet brings out the fear to the public. The various social fears in risk society cannot be reduced if the people do not trust the information from the internet. And moreover, if there is antipathy toward subjects disseminating the information, it is hard to implement the policy successfully. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the issues of trust in information on the internet in case of nuclear power energy.
A lot of studies have conceptually focused on trust. However, there are few empirical study about the diverse trust. Based on reflecting the limits of existing researches, this study is to examine whether or not the opposition in online and offline opposition which is assumed to be influenced by multidimensional trust. For this work, we set up such opposition action toward nuclear power energy in online and offline as dependent variables. As an independent variable we adopt the factor from perception paradigm (perceived benefit, perceived risk, safety knowledge and stigma) and for trust in cyberspace (trust in government, trust in public, trust in information source and trust in information).
By analyzing survey data from internet users, we expect the following implications. First, we can provide empirical evidences about the effect of trusts on opposition to nuclear power energy. Second, such effect can be differed according to online or offline context.