Information Privacy Paradox: A Neural Science Study

Most people indicate disclosure of private information as a concern but keep revealing personal information in actual behavior. This inconsistency is called “privacy paradox”. Previous literature has proposed a few interpretations of this paradoxical behavior from the rational perspective- privacy calculus. However, individuals are not purely rational decision- makers. They might be bounded by psychological limitations which are often unconscious. Drawing on the dual-process model, this study suggests that the occurrence of contradictory behavior can be explained by the decision-making process people adopted in their actual behavior different from they adopted in their self-report. In many cases, people tend to state their choices after the rational information process even when their behavior indicates they are following their intuition. An electroencephalographic experiment is conducted to capture direct responses when an individual makes privacy-related decisions, further demonstrate that individual’s privacy decision-making process is not totally rational