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Subliminal Warnings – A New Approach to Change Users' Behavior

Authors:
Mini Zeng
Feng Zhu
Sandra Carpenter

Keywords: Subliminal Messages; Non-conscious Processing; Warnings.

Abstract:
People use web applications and services every day. They encounter many cyber-attacks in their daily lives. Cybersecurity warnings remind users to be cautious but often they are not effective because users ignore them. Existing warnings often compete for the limited resource – conscious attention. Cognitive psychology indicates that human behavior can be affected by non-conscious processing. The goal of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of subliminal warnings. We propose a subliminal warning design that directly suggests users behave cautiously. We used a pilot study to guide our design. We conducted a lab experiment to evaluate the subliminal warning strategy in the context of privacy protection. We implemented an integrated hardware and software environment to evaluate our warning design, study users' behavior, and to validate and verify the proper display of subliminal warning messages. Our experimental results showed that subliminal warnings effectively reduced identity disclosure. Warning designs based on cognitive psychology and human factors may better protect people's privacy.

Pages: 88 to 97

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2022

Publication date: June 26, 2022

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-982-9

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from June 26, 2022 to June 30, 2022