The project explores the influence that offline cues and stimuli, indicating the presence of other human beings in the physical world, and often processed unconsciously by our brains, can have over security and privacy behavior in cyberspace.
The project is predicated around an evolutionary conjecture: Human beings have evolved to detect and react to threats in their physical environment, and have developed perceptual systems selected to assess these ?physical? stimuli for current, material risks. In cyberspace, the same stimuli often are absent, subdued, or intentionally manipulated by third parties. Hence, security and privacy concerns that would normally be activated in the offline world are restrained, and defense behaviors are hampered.
While it is impossible to test such conjecture directly, indirect evidence compatible with the conjecture can be obtained by investigating the impact that external stimuli in the physical world have on security and privacy behavior in cyberspace. The proposed research consists in a stream of human subjects controlled experiments investigating such impact of various sets of stimuli or cues.
This significance of this research is two-fold. First, it attempts to advance the scientific understanding of what makes security and privacy decision making in cyberspace uniquely different from, and sometimes more difficult than security and privacy in the physical world. Second, by investigating a factor that may significantly disrupt user behavior in cyberspace, the research findings could inspire the construction of systems that induce more secure behavior.
