Security Goal Matters: Impact of Threat-Prevention and Threat-Detection Behavior on Security Outcomes

To reduce cyberattack risk, individuals are commonly encouraged to take security behaviors to prevent or detect IT threats. Previous research always generalized their empirical findings from specific security behaviors to all security behaviors, which is problematic because people who adopt different security behaviors may have different mechanisms and antecedents. This study uses the protection motivation theory (PMT) as a general theory and explores how the nature of security behavior (i.e., IT threat-detection behavior versus IT threat-prevention behavior) affects individuals’ security-related outcomes, as well as what factors influence the extent of these relationships. We introduce construal level theory (CLT) to argue that IT threat detection security behaviors (versus IT threat prevention security behaviors) strengthen the effects of threat perception (versus efficacy perception) on one’s protection motivation. We further propose that individuals’ construal level determines the extent of these relationships. Two online experiments will be used to verify our hypotheses