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

Abstract

While the effectiveness of nudges in influencing user behavior has been documented within the literature, most prior work in the privacy field has focused on ‘one-size-fits-all’ interventions. Recent behavioral research has identified the potential of tailoring nudges to users by leveraging individual differences in decision making and personality. We present the results of three online experiments aimed at investigating whether nudges tailored to various psychometric scales can influence participants’ disclosure choices. Each study adopted a difference-in-differences design, testing whether differences in disclosure rates for participants presented with a nudge were affected by differences along various psychometric variables. Study 1 used a hypothetical disclosure scenario to measure participants’ responses to a single nudge. Study 2 and its replication (Study 3) tested responses in real disclosure scenarios to two nudges. Across all studies, we failed to find significant effects robustly linking any of the measured psychometric variables to differences in disclosure rates. We describe our study design and results along with a discussion of the practicality of using decision making and personality traits to tailor privacy nudges.

Keywords: Security, Privacy, Economics, Privacy Protections, Nudges, Behavior