Ebert Nico, Ackermann Kurt A, Bearth Angela
Center for Process Management & Information Security, Institute of Business Information Technology (IWI), ZHAW SML, Winterthur, Switzerland.
Center for Behavioral Insights & Pricing, Institute of Marketing Management (IMM), ZHAW SML.
J Risk Res. 2022 Nov 14;26(3):233-255. doi: 10.1080/13669877.2022.2142952. eCollection 2023.
Prior research on how to improve the effectiveness of information security warnings has predominantly focused on either the informational content of warnings or their visual saliency. In an online experiment ( = 1'486), we disentangle the effect of both manipulations and demonstrate that both factors simultaneously influence decision making. Our data indicate that the proportion of people who engage in protection behavior can be increased by roughly 65% by making a particular warning message more visually salient (i.e. a more conspicuous visual design is used). We also show that varying the message's saliency can make people behave very differently when confronted with the same threat or behave very similarly when confronted with threats that differ widely in terms of severity of outcomes. Our results suggest that the visual design of a warning may warrant at least as much attention as the informational content that the warning message conveys.
先前关于如何提高信息安全警告有效性的研究主要集中在警告的信息内容或其视觉显著性上。在一项在线实验（n = 1486）中，我们剖析了这两种操作的效果，并证明这两个因素同时影响决策。我们的数据表明，通过使特定的警告信息在视觉上更加突出（即使用更显眼的视觉设计），采取保护行为的人数比例可以提高约65%。我们还表明，改变信息的显著性会使人们在面对相同威胁时表现出非常不同的行为，或者在面对结果严重程度差异很大的威胁时表现出非常相似的行为。我们的结果表明，警告的视觉设计可能至少与警告信息所传达的信息内容一样值得关注。
