Abstract
Cyber security researchers are starting to experiment with fear appeals, with a wide variety of designs and reported efficaciousness. This makes it hard to derive recommendations for designing and deploying these interventions. We thus reviewed the wider fear appeal literature to arrive at a set of guidelines to assist cyber security researchers. Our review revealed a degree of dissent about whether or not fear appeals are indeed helpful and advisable. Our review also revealed a wide range of fear appeal experimental designs, in both cyber and other domains, which confirms the need for some standardized guidelines to inform practice in this respect. We propose a protocol for carrying out fear appeal experiments, and we review a sample of cyber security fear appeal studies, via this lens, to provide a snapshot of the current state of play. We hope the proposed experimental protocol will prove helpful to those who wish to engage in future cyber security fear appeal research.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | NSPW '19 |
Subtitle of host publication | proceedings of the New Security Paradigms Workshop |
Place of Publication | New York |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 42-56 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781450376471 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 15 Jan 2020 |
Event | New Security Paradigm Workshop - San Carlos, Costa Rica Duration: 23 Sep 2019 → 26 Sep 2019 |
Conference
Conference | New Security Paradigm Workshop |
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Abbreviated title | NSPW 2019 |
Country | Costa Rica |
City | San Carlos |
Period | 23/09/19 → 26/09/19 |