Why We Blab Our Intimate
Secrets on Facebook
Leslie K. John and colleagues set
out to discover the reason behind a common discrepancy: While many of us
purport to be concerned about Internet privacy, we seem to have no worries
about sharing our most intimate details on Facebook.
A few years ago, when Leslie
K. John was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, a classmate
introduced her to a then-nascent website called Facebook. John took a look,
scrolling through page after page of photographs, personal confessions, and
ongoing accounts of people's every move. She found the whole thing perplexing.
“We show that people are prone to sharing more information
in the very context in which it’s more dangerous to share.”
"I didn't understand why people
were putting all this information out there," says John, now an assistant
professor in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. "There seemed
to be a constant need for people to give status updates on what they were
doing. It was very bizarre to me."
John's curiosity led to a raft of
collaborative research about information disclosure in the age of social media.
Her goal: to determine when we're most likely to divulge intimate facts and
when we're apt to keep our lives to ourselves.
In short, the initial findings
indicate that individuals are both illogical and careless with their privacy on
the web. "We show that people are prone to sharing more information in the
very contexts in which it's more dangerous to share," John says.
Creepy
questions
Specifically, John and two
colleagues from Carnegie Mellon set out to study a common contradictory
attitude toward Internet privacy. On the one hand, studies show that Americans
are wary of companies having access to their personal information. For example,
in a February 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of 2,253 adult
respondents answered they would not be OK with a search engine (such as Google)
keeping track of their searches and using the results to personalize future
searches. And 68 percent said they were uncomfortable with targeted advertising
for the same reason: they didn't want anyone tracking their behavior. On the
other hand, millions of people routinely share the most intimate details of
their lives via various social media sites.
With a series of field and lab
experiments, John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein shed some light
on the discrepancy.
In each experiment, the researchers
asked participants to answer a list of questions to indicate whether they had
engaged in various sensitive activities—looking at pornographic material,
cheating on a romantic partner, trying cocaine, and so on. "We basically
sat down together and brainstormed creepy questions to ask," John says.
The experiments tested the idea that
downplaying privacy concerns would increase the likelihood of disclosure. For
example, the researchers set up laptop computers across the Carnegie Mellon
campus and asked passersby to fill out a "Web survey about student
behaviors," which comprised 15 yes/no questions. Unbeknownst to them, the
participants were randomly assigned to one of three user-interface conditions.
In some cases, they took an online survey titled "How
BAD Are U???" Deliberately designed to look unprofessional, it
featured red font and a pixelated cartoon devil. Other participants received a
deliberately professional-looking survey titled "Carnegie Mellon
University Executive Council Survey on Ethical Behaviors," which sported
the school's official crest. A third set, the control group, received the
relatively neutral "Survey of Student Behaviors."
The questions were exactly the same
in every case. Yet participants in the "unprofessional" condition
were almost twice (1.98 times) as likely to admit to having engaged in the
various behaviors relative to those in the "professional" condition,
with the control group answers generally falling in the middle.
From a logical Internet privacy
viewpoint, the results don't make sense. After all, an amateur website of
unknown origins is likely far less concerned with data protection than a
professional website of a firm or university. But according to John, the
research supports the hypothesis that people often don't even think about
privacy unless reminded to do so. Ironically, professionalism seemed to remind
participants that airing their affairs might have negative consequences.
"When you're on a very
official-looking site, it sort of cues you in to think about the concept of
privacy," she says. "We argue that oftentimes, privacy isn't
something that's at the forefront of people's minds until you cue it."
To further test this argument, the
researchers repeated their experiment, but added a very deliberate privacy cue
at the onset: Before completing the personal survey, some participants took a
test called "Phind the phishing emails," in which they viewed screen
shots of email messages and identified them as "just spam" or
"phishing"—the common cybercrime of masquerading as a trustworthy
source to acquire data such as credit card information. Others (the control
group) took a test called "find the endangered fish."
Indeed, thinking about phishing
caused participants to be equally judicious in their responses, regardless of
whether they were taking the "How BAD Are U???" or the
"Executive Council on Ethical Behavior" survey. (Looking at pictures of
endangered Acadian redfish and Atlantic halibut had no effect.)
Indirect
questions
The researchers also showed that
people are likely to share information online if a personal question comes at
them in a roundabout way. In another experiment, they teamed up with New York
Times science columnist John Tierney, who posted a survey called "Test
Your Ethics" on his official blog. Some 890 readers completed the survey,
unaware that they were part of a research project. Upon clicking a link, all
participants were presented with a list of 16 arguably unethical behaviors. For
each one, they rated the behavior on a scale of "not at all
unethical" to "extremely unethical" and answered questions about
whether they themselves had ever engaged in that behavior.
“We basically sat down together and brainstormed creepy
questions to ask.”
However, the nature of the inquiry
varied from participant to participant. In some cases the question was point
blank: "Have you done this behavior?" But in others, the question was
indirect: Participants had the choice of answering "If you have ever done this
behavior, how unethical do you think it was?" or "If you have never
done this behavior, how unethical do you think it would be, if you were to
choose to do it?" Unfailingly, the researchers found that participants
were far more likely to admit to a behavior when the question was posed
indirectly.
Simply changing the order of the
survey questions also had a direct effect on information disclosure. If shocked
at the start, respondents would let their guard. The researchers found that
participants were more likely to divulge personal information if the questions
were presented in decreasing order of intrusiveness—starting with "Have
you had sex with the current husband, wife, or partner of a friend?" and
ending with the relatively tame "In the last year, have you eaten meat,
poultry, or fish?"
Participants also were more likely
to admit to unethical behavior if they were told that other participants had
reported misdeeds, too. That herd mentality helps explain the propensity to air
dirty laundry on Facebook, John explains. In fact, with so many Facebook
members oversharing, it's gotten to the point that people get suspicious when
their peers don't overshare.
In a recent experiment, John and HBS
Associate Professor Michael I. Norton asked several college students to fill
out a brief questionnaire, choosing to answer a personal question about either
a desirable behavior (such as charity work) or an undesirable behavior (such as
cheating). The students could respond to only one of the questions, with the
understanding that another group of participants would be rating the answers on
a scale of trustworthiness.
Many respondents chose to answer the
question about positive behavior, assuming that this would show them in the
most trustworthy light. But in fact, the group rating the answers tended to
give higher trustworthiness scores to the students who chose to reveal unsavory
behavior instead. "People tend to assume the worst about those who choose
not to divulge," John says.
The
broad implications
So why aren't most of us more
logical and judicious in our approach to Internet privacy? "Broadly, the
lesson of this research is that people don't really know how to value their own
information," John says. "Because of this uncertainty about what the
value of privacy is, people don't know when to value their information or how
to care about it. And as a consequence, when people are uncertain, their
judgments are often influenced by seemingly arbitrary contextual factors."
The research should prove useful to
marketing firms, which often use online quizzes and games to garner detailed
demographic information. But the findings also highlight a catch-22 situation
for conscientious companies. While these firms want to ensure customer privacy
for legal and ethical reasons, the mere act of ensuring privacy seems to
suppress information disclosure.
What's the solution? "Perhaps
the happy medium for marketers is to protect people's privacy, but don't
explicitly tell them you're doing that," John says. "That may be a
slippery slope. It may lead to the temptation just not to bother protecting
people's privacy. But I would hope that the virtuous marketer would resist that
temptation."
Carmen Nobel is senior editor of Harvard
Business School Working Knowledge.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7102.html?wknews=09052012
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