Privacy Considerations when Designing Social Network Systems to Support Successful Ageing

A number of interventions exist to support older adults in ageing well and these typically involve support for an active and sociable ageing process. We set out to examine the privacy implications of an intervention that would monitor mobility and share lifestyle and health data with a community of trusted others. We took a privacy-by-design approach to the system in the early stages of its development, working with older adults to firstly understand their networks of trust and secondly understand their privacy concerns should information be exchanged across that network. We used a Johari Windows framework in the thematic analysis of our data, concluding that the social sharing of information in later life carried significant risk. Our participants worried about the social signaling associated with data sharing and were cautious about a system that had the potential to disrupt established networks

Testing the BFI-2 in a non-WEIRD community sample

Two studies testing the validity and the nomological properties of the Turkish adaptation of the revised version of Big Five Inventory (BFI-2) using a university student sample and a nationally representative community sample of youth aged 18-35

The Effect of Perspective Taking on Moral Judgments of Interpersonal Conflicts

This project investigates the effect of perspective-taking (Study 1a, 1b, & 1c) and perceived perspective-taking (Study 2 & 3) on moral judgments of interpersonal conflicts

It Is Hard to Read Minds without Words: Cues to Use to Achieve Empathic Accuracy

When faced with the task of trying to “read” a stranger’s thoughts, what cues can perceivers use? We explore two predictors of empathic accuracy (the ability to accurately infer another person’s thoughts): use of stereotypes about the target’s group, and use of the target’s own words. A sample of 326 White American undergraduate students were asked to infer the dynamic thoughts of Middle Eastern male targets, using Ickes’ (Ickes et al. 1990) empathic accuracy paradigm. We predicted use of stereotypes would reduce empathic accuracy because the stereotypes would be negative and inaccurate. However, more stereotypical inferences about the target’s thoughts actually predicted greater empathic accuracy, a pattern in line with past work on the role of stereotypes in empathic accuracy (Lewis et al. 2012), perhaps because the stereotypes of Middle Easterners (collected from a sample of 60 participants drawn from the same population) were less negative than expected. In addition, perceivers who inferred that the targets were thinking thoughts that more closely matched what the target was saying out loud were more empathically accurate. Despite the fact that words can be used intentionally to obscure what a target is thinking, they appear to be a useful cue to empathic accuracy, even in tricky contexts that cross cultural lines

Getting the privacy calculus right: Analyzing the relations between privacy concerns, expected benefits, and self-disclosure using response surface analysis

Rational models of privacy self-management such as privacy calculus assume that sharing personal information online can be explained by individuals’ perceptions of risks and benefits. Previous research tested this assumption by conducting conventional multivariate procedures, including path analysis or structural equation modeling. However, these analytical approaches cannot account for the potential conjoint effects of risk and benefit perceptions. In this paper, we use a novel analytical approach called polynomial regressions with response surface analysis (RSA) to investigate potential non-linear and conjoint effects based on three data sets (N1 = 344, N2 = 561, N3 = 1.131). In all three datasets, we find that people self-disclose more when gratifications exceed concerns. In two datasets, we also find that self-disclosure increases when both risk and benefit perceptions are on higher rather than lower levels, suggesting that gratifications play an important role in determining whether and how risk considerations will factor into the decision to disclose information