Effects of Safety Priming and Security Framing on App Selection
Primary Investigator:
Robert Proctor
Isis Chong, Huangyi Ge, Dr. Ninghui Li, Dr. Robert W. Proctor
Abstract
Mobile apps have the potential to gain access to and exploit users’ private information. Consequently, potential interventions to increase users’ safety need to be investigated. We recruited participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to complete an app-selection task examining effects of subjective versus objective priming conditions on app-installation decisions in the presence of a summary safety/risk score. Participants were more likely to pick safer apps when, prior to the app-selection task, they were asked to consider their own thoughts on safety or presented with examples of app permission requests than when no safety-related information was presented. These results imply that activating security as part of a user’s task set may cause them to consider safety in their decisions more than they would otherwise.