{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,9]],"date-time":"2026-07-09T15:55:32Z","timestamp":1783612532311,"version":"3.55.0"},"reference-count":46,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,2]],"date-time":"2026-05-02T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1777680000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Information"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Health chatbots have been growing into a necessary tool for dealing with risky and important contexts, such as medical and health information seeking. Meanwhile, trust towards chatbots influences people\u2019s willingness to embrace technology and use it consistently. Thus, it is important to explore the mechanism of forming trust towards the health chatbots. The TAM has been introduced to explain the mechanism. This study extends the TAM framework by incorporating perceived risk and self-efficacy to develop an expanded model that explains the mechanisms underlying trust formation in health chatbots, applying a survey and investigating 480 Chinese chatbot users on the Credamo. The findings show that perceived risk reduces trust both directly and indirectly through perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and self-efficacy. Both parallel and serial mediation pathways were supported. These results offer a more complete insight into trust formation in high-risk AI contexts and provide practical guidance for chatbot design and governance in health communication.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/info17050439","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,4]],"date-time":"2026-05-04T01:12:09Z","timestamp":1777857129000},"page":"439","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Perceived Risk and Trust Towards Health Chatbots: Extending TAM with Self-Efficacy"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"17","author":[{"given":"Le","family":"Song","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Educational Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0490-6304","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jie","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences & Shanxi Development Research Center, Taiyuan 030032, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Maizura","family":"Yasin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Educational Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9689-8235","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Marzni Mohamed","family":"Mokhtar","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Educational Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2377","DOI":"10.1002\/mar.21556","article-title":"Human versus chatbot: Understanding the role of emotion in health marketing communication for vaccines","volume":"38","author":"Tsai","year":"2021","journal-title":"Psychol. 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