Identity‐Based Motivation and the Logic of Conversations Obfuscate Loss of Online Privacy and What Policy‐Makers Can Do About It

Abstract

People care about their privacy, but when they are online, they do not act as if they do. We apply the psychology of meaning-making to shed light on why that is. Acquisti, Loewenstein, and Brandimarte (2020) review of factors relevant to gaps between privacy attitudes and behaviors highlights both the importance of the problem of online privacy and its intractability, given current thinking about what can be done. Connecting their discussion with the psychology of meaning-making, operationalized by integrating identity-based motivation theory with the logic of communication and anthropomorphizing, this commentary addresses why people narrowly conceptualize what privacy they are losing and fail to act as if privacy matters, as well as what can be done about it at a policy level.

Seeing meaning even when none may exist: Collectivism increases belief in empty claims.

“…Our work implies that to undo the effect of collectivism, people's motivation to seek meaning needs to be disrupted. This can be done, for example, by pointing out that the content comes from a nonhuman communicator (for example, Internet bots) or an untrustworthy source (e.g., Oyserman & Schwarz, 2020).…”

Designing for All: Consumer Response to Inclusive Design

“…To place the user at the heart of the design process, a designer needs to understand who the user is. Therefore, it is important to clarify what we mean by the word “inclusive” in the phrase “inclusive design.” Because identity is multidimensional (Oyserman & Schwarz, 2020) and includes a combination of age, developmental and acquired disabilities, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, indigenous heritage, national origin, and gender, we use the ADDRESSING framework, first defined by Hays (2008), to capture the full range of identity considerations that can inform inclusive design (see Table 2).…”