Biblio

Phishing is an act of technology-based deception that targets individuals to obtain information. To minimize the number of phishing attacks, factors that influence the ability to identify phishing attempts must be examined. The present study aimed to determine how individual differences relate to performance on a phishing task. Undergraduate students completed a questionnaire designed to assess impulsivity, trust, personality characteristics, and Internet/security habits. Participants performed an email task where they had to discriminate between legitimate emails and phishing attempts. Researchers assessed performance in terms of correctly identifying all email types (overall accuracy) as well as accuracy in identifying phishing emails (phishing accuracy). Results indicated that overall and phishing accuracy each possessed unique trust, personality, and impulsivity predictors, but shared one significant behavioral predictor. These results present distinct predictors of phishing susceptibility that should be incorporated in the development of anti-phishing technology and training.

Humans can easily find themselves in high cost situations where they must choose between suggestions made by an automated decision aid and a conflicting human decision aid. Previous research indicates that trust is an antecedent to reliance, and often influences how individuals prioritize and integrate information presented from a human and/or automated information source. Expanding on previous work conducted by Lyons and Stokes (2012), the current experiment measured how trust in automated or human decision aids differs along with perceived risk and workload. The simulated task required 126 participants to choose the safest route for a military convoy; they were presented with conflicting information regarding which route was safest from an automated tool and a human. Results demonstrated that as workload increased, trust in automation decreased. As the perceived risk increased, trust in the human decision aid increased. Individual differences in dispositional trust correlated with an increased trust in both decision aids. These findings can be used to inform training programs and systems for operators who may receive information from human and automated sources. Examples of this context include: air traffic control, aviation, and signals intelligence.