Effects of emotional appeals on phishing susceptibility

The heightened sophistication of phishing attacks results in billions of dollars of financial losses, loss of intellectual property, and reputational damage to organizations. Unlike most studies on phishing that utilize a strict cognitive approach, this study attempts to explore phishing susceptibility with an emotional lens. Using an integrated perspective of emotion, we build on the Affective Information Model (AIM) to predict effects from valence (positive vs. negative), certainty (certain vs. uncertain), and arousal (high arousal vs. low arousal) on phishing susceptibility. We test our hypotheses using a mock phishing experiment (N = 474) and demonstrate that messages inducing positive valence and uncertainty result in higher phishing susceptibility. This study contributes to phishing literature by illuminating the critical role that emotion plays in inducing recipients’ susceptibility in their processing of phishing messages

Phishing Susceptibility across Industries: The Differential Impact of Influence Techniques

Organizations are increasingly becoming the target of phishing attacks, and victimization is typically accompanied by financial loss, disclosure of private information, and reputational damage. Building on existing persuasion and phishing literature, we argue that shared industry practices, values, and assumptions alter the effectiveness of phishing influence techniques. We tested our hypotheses with a quasi-experiment (n = 10,967) using a secondary dataset containing the results of mock phishing attacks sent to 30 finance and 15 non-finance organizations. Results demonstrated variability in susceptibility to phishing influence techniques due to industry. Consistent with our theorizing, phishing techniques such as liking were more effective among non-finance organizations and social proof, reciprocity, and authority were more effective among finance organizations. These findings address past inconsistencies in empirical phishing research and offer support for a more nuanced perspective concerning phishing susceptibility due to industry characteristics. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Attribution of Responsibility after Failures within Platform Ecosystems

Increasingly, new hardware and software are embedded within ecosystems that include a platform and modules. Ideally these ecosystems perform reliably. However, if an ambiguously sourced failure occurs within one of these ecosystems, users are left to distribute blame across the various components of the ecosystem. The actual distribution of this blame, however, can be difficult to predict. This study investigates attribution of blame and discontinuance recommendations for ecosystem components after an ambiguously sourced failure. To extend platform ecosystems and attribution theory, we conducted a scenario-based experiment investigating the negative consequences of failure for platform and module components and the contingent effects from design elements (border strength) and contextual factors (task goal directedness, disruption severity). Results demonstrated a diffusion of negative consequences for failure across ecosystem components, but ecosystem modules (apps) received the majority of the blame and highest discontinuance recommendations. High border strength shifted negative consequences for failure away from the OS to the device. Low goal-directedness resulted in users taking more of the blame for the failure, and higher disruption severity resulted in higher discontinuance recommendations for the OS and device. Importantly, the amount of blame attributed to one component in an ecosystem predicted discontinuance recommendations for other components

The Differential Effects Of Technological Cues On Elaboration

There is an abundance of user reviews available online about anything, ranging from commercial products to professors.According to the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), users can elaborate on the relevant information as long as they havethe motivation and the cognitive ability to do so. However, the extent of information found online can be so overwhelmingthat it may exceed the cognitive capacity of its seeker, and cause an overload. We propose that technological cues can helpusers identify the most relevant and useful information. The hypotheses were tested using 39 students in a study based on aprofessor-review website. Findings suggest that sorting the reviews by their helpfulness interacts with ability in determiningthe participants’ extent of elaboration. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Eye of the Blamestorm: An Exploration of User Blame Assessment within Compound Digital Platforms

More and more IS-enabled technologies are being used within the context of ecosystems that include both hardware and software components that act together as a central platform; we term these ecosystems digital compound platform ecosystems. However, given the interconnectedness of components within these platforms, if an ambiguously sourced failure occurs within one of these ecosystems, users may blame and/or take action against components in the ecosystem that were not actually at fault. This study considers antecedents of both blame and discontinuance intent within such ecosystems given a system failure of ambiguous origins. We test manipulations for border strength, goal directedness, and resolution duration to understand their impact. We find that all three of these manipulations have an effect on user assessment of blame and discontinuance intent. Further, we establish that blame is not a required condition for discontinuance intent to occur

Automated and Participative Decision Support in Computer-aided Credibility Assessment

History has shown that inaccurate assessments of credibility can result in tremendous costs to businesses and society. This study uses Signal Detection Theory (SDT) to improve the accuracy of credibility assessments through combining automated and participatory decision support. Participatory decision support is also proposed to encourage acceptance of the decision aid’s recommendation. A new hybrid decision aid is designed to perform automated linguistic analysis and elicit and analyze perceptual cues (i.e., indirect cues) from an observer. The results suggest that decision aids that collect both linguistic and indirect cues perform better than decision aids that collect only one type of cue. Users of systems that collect linguistic cues experience improved credibility assessment accuracy; yet, users of systems that collect both types of cues or only indirect cues do not experience higher accuracy. However, collecting indirect cues increases the user’s acceptance of decision-aid recommendations

Phishing Training: A Preliminary Look at the Effects of Different Types of Training

In this paper, we present the preliminary results of an experiment conducted to observe the impact of the different training techniques to increase the likelihood of participants identifying and reporting phishing messages. Three different training approaches were used – general video/quiz training, just-in-time training with simulated phishing emails, and a leaderboard, which awarded users points for forwarding correct phishing messages and penalized them for incorrect ones. The experiment emulated a normal working day of an executive assistant of a manager in an organization. Each participant was expected to accomplish work tasks and respond to work-related emails while watching for and reporting phishing messages. We observed that both general training and the presence of a leaderboard decreased the propensity to click on a phishing message, while we found no effect for different types of just-in-time training

Deceptive Language by Innocent and Guilty Criminal Suspects: The Influence of Dominance, Question, and Guilt on Interview Responses

Matthew L. Jensen is an assistant professor in the Price College of Business and a researcher in the Center for Applied Social Research at the University of Oklahoma. His primary research interests are deception and credibility in online and face-to-face interaction. Recent publications have dealt with computer-aided deception detection and establishing credibility online.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Pain Coping Skills Training for Patients Who Catastrophize About Pain Prior to Knee Arthroplasty: A Multisite Randomized Clinical Trial

BACKGROUND: Pain catastrophizing has been identified as a prognostic indicator of poor outcome following knee arthroplasty. Interventions to address pain catastrophizing, to our knowledge, have not been tested in patients undergoing knee arthroplasty. The purpose of this study was to determine whether pain coping skills training in persons with moderate to high pain catastrophizing undergoing knee arthroplasty improves outcomes 12 months postoperatively compared with usual care or arthritis education. METHODS: A multicenter, 3-arm, single-blinded, randomized comparative effectiveness trial was performed involving 5 university-based medical centers in the United States. There were 402 randomized participants. The primary outcome was the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) Pain Scale, measured at baseline, 2 months, 6 months, and 12 months following the surgical procedure. RESULTS: Participants were recruited from January 2013 to June 2016. In 402 participants, 66% were women and the mean age of the participants (and standard deviation) was 63.2 ± 8.0 years. Three hundred and forty-six participants (90% of those who underwent a surgical procedure) completed a 12-month follow-up. All 3 treatment groups had large improvements in 12-month WOMAC pain scores with no significant differences (p > 0.05) among the 3 treatment arms. No differences were found between WOMAC pain scores at 12 months for the pain coping skills and arthritis education groups (adjusted mean difference, 0.3 [95% confidence interval (CI), -0.9 to 1.5]) or between the pain coping and usual-care groups (adjusted mean difference, 0.4 [95% CI, -0.7 to 1.5]). Secondary outcomes also showed no significant differences (p > 0.05) among the 3 groups. CONCLUSIONS: Among adults with pain catastrophizing undergoing knee arthroplasty, cognitive behaviorally based pain coping skills training did not confer pain or functional benefit beyond the large improvements achieved with usual surgical and postoperative care. Future research should develop interventions for the approximately 20% of patients undergoing knee arthroplasty who experience persistent function-limiting pain. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Therapeutic Level I. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence

On the frequencies of circumbinary discs in protostellar systems

We report the analysis of circumbinary discs formed in a radiation hydrodynamical simulation of star cluster formation. We consider both pure binary stars and pairs within triple and quadruple systems. The protostellar systems are all young (ages < $10^5$ yrs). We find that the systems that host a circumbinary disc have a median separation of $\approx 11$ au, and the median characteristic radius of the discs is $\approx 64$ au. We find that $89$ per cent of pure binaries with semi-major axes $a<1$ au have a circumbinary disc, and the occurrence rate of circumbinary discs is bimodal with log-separation in pure binaries with a second peak at $a \approx 50$ au. Systems with $a>100$ au almost never have a circumbinary disc. The median size of a circumbinary disc is between $\approx 5-6\ a$ depending on the order of the system, with higher order systems having larger discs relative to binary separation. We find the underlying distribution of mutual inclinations between circumbinary discs and binary orbit of both observed and simulated discs to not differ statistically.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in MNRA