Personality and Social Framing in Privacy Decision-Making: A Study on Cookie Acceptance

Abstract

Despite their best intentions, people struggle with the realities of privacy protection and will often sacrifice privacy for convenience in their online activities. Individuals show systematic, personality dependent differences in their privacy decision making, which makes it interesting for those who seek to design ‘nudges’ designed to manipulate privacy behaviors. We explore such effects in a cookie decision task. Two hundred and ninety participants were given an incidental website review task that masked the true aim of the study. At the task outset, they were asked whether they wanted to accept a cookie in a message that either contained a social framing ‘nudge’ (they were told that either a majority or a minority of users like themselves had accepted the cookie) or contained no information about social norms (control). At the end of the task, participants were asked to complete a range of personality assessments (impulsivity, risk-taking, willingness to self-disclose and sociability). We found social framing to be an effective behavioral nudge, reducing cookie acceptance in the minority social norm condition. Further, we found personality effects in that those scoring highly on risk-taking and impulsivity were significantly more likely to accept the cookie. Finally, we found that the application of a social nudge could attenuate the personality effects of impulsivity and risk-taking. We explore the implications for those working in the privacy-by-design space.

Incorporating Social Media into your Support Tool Box: Points to Consider from Genetics‐Based Communities

“…Patient personality traits and demographics might influence privacy preferences in social media use (Coventry et al 2016;Egleman and Peer, 2015;Acquisti and Grossklags, 2005;Krasnova et al, 2012). Individuals' intentions also likely mitigate privacy concerns and self-disclosure (Bazarova and Choi, 2014).…”

Can Privacy Nudges be Tailored to Individuals' Decision Making and Personality Traits?

“…These findings further point to the potential for privacy nudges to be tailored to the individual traits of users. In a separate study, Coventry et al examined the effects of a single nudge on cookie acceptance for web browsers [12]. The authors measure several personality traits, but fail to find evidence that the traits moderate the effectiveness of the nudge.…”

“…Although this is potentially highly significant, it only encompasses a portion of the range of potential Big Five Extraversion scores and indicates that the effect may be fragile. 12 6.2.4 Johnson-Neyman Analysis. In addition to our regression analysis, we examined our data for Study 2 and Study 3 using the Johnson-Neyman technique.…”

Understanding User Preferences of Digital Privacy Nudges – A Best-Worst Scaling Approach

“…The effect of social influence privacy nudges is based on the principle of social norms. The individual derives to what extent it is appropriate to share personal information from the behavior of his fellow users [30,31]. The majority's decision influences the perception and the behavior of users in a way [28] that others get the feeling of trying to imitate the behavior of the majority [31].…”

“…The individual derives to what extent it is appropriate to share personal information from the behavior of his fellow users [30,31]. The majority's decision influences the perception and the behavior of users in a way [28] that others get the feeling of trying to imitate the behavior of the majority [31]. The more people have the same opinion on a particular topic, the more likely it is to elicit the same opinion in others [27] because behavior of like-minded people leads to individual behavior [32].…”