Beware online confessions
Why do we reveal so much about ourselves on the web, especially since we also claim to be worried about privacy?
In the fledgling days of Facebook, when it had just a few thousand users and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was a student, he boasted to a friend over an instant message service about all the personal information he’d acquired.
“what!? how’d you manage that one?” was the response.
In reply, Zuckerberg typed: “people just submitted it / i don’t know why / they “trust me” / dumb f[****]”. (It is ironic that a private conversation about privacy was leaked, to the Silicon Alley Insider website.)
In fairness to Facebook, these are different times and it is a different organisation. And yet the question Mr Zuckerberg’s friend asked remains fascinating. Why do we reveal so much about ourselves online, especially since we also claim to be worried about privacy?
Three behavioural researchers, Leslie John of Harvard Business School and Alessandro Acquisti and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University, have been trying to figure out the answer.
John and her colleagues wanted to explore the kind of contextual cues that persuade us to bare our souls. In a series of experiments, they used online surveys to ask intrusive questions, exploring what sort of cues might provoke revealing answers.
In a survey posted on a New York Times blog, billed as “Test Your Ethics”, almost a thousand respondents answered questions about whether they had cheated on their taxes, omitted to tell a partner about a sexually transmitted disease, or filed a false insurance claim. For some participants, the questions were asked directly – “have you ever done this?” with a yes/no answer. A follow-up question then asked them to rate the morality of the practice. But for other participants, the questions were indirect: asking people “if you have EVER done this behaviour, how unethical do you think it was” and similarly, “if you have NEVER done this behaviour….” The questions demand the same information, but more people admitted to the dubious behaviour when the questions were asked indirectly. Intriguingly, 88 per cent of respondents also supplied their email address.
Later experiments tested the kind of web design that would provoke candour. Students were invited to answer questions on a laptop, with different students being exposed to identical questions underneath three different headers. One looked very official, with the Carnegie Mellon crest on the top, entitled “Carnegie Mellon University Executive Council Survey on Ethical Behaviors”. Another was neutral. The third asked, “How BAD are U?”, with a perky red font and a logo showing a little devil.
Objectively, it would not seem very smart to divulge information to the little devil site. “There is a wealth of research showing it is more dangerous to divulge on these websites,” says Ms John. Yet that is what happened. “I find the result quite alarming,” she told me.”
There are two obvious alternative interpretations of the results. One is that students, who were from CMU, didn’t care to confess their sins to an official-looking site. (HM Revenue and Customs may be trustworthy, but they are the last people I’d tell if I was cheating on my tax return.) Yet the neutral website drew similar results to the official-looking one, which suggests that the results were not down to a fear of punishment. Nor is there any indication that the little devil website encouraged students to think it was cool to have unprotected sex or take drugs (the researchers checked this). Instead, it somehow persuaded them to banish privacy concerns from their minds.
Online, there are many more influences guiding our disclosure than the simple appearance of a site. But this research is an important reminder that we are easily nudged into revealing more than, on careful reflection, we might wish to.
Also published at ft.com.
5 Comments
Jaaziel Charishma Ragland says:
Great article Tim… People get a strange kick out of revealing truths, nasty ones. It could be either because of a sense of security at being physically not seen or because of competition. I have seen similar things in game forums where people start revealing embarrassing truths in response to similar truths by others… which becomes a competition sort of thing. Though the authenticity of these “truths” are in question.
27th of August, 2011Greg says:
As the previous commenter says. Why on earth do we assume that anything someone has typed into a website is true?
27th of August, 2011Greg
Not my real name :-)
Nick says:
A few questions:
1) Was there an option to provide no answer?
27th of August, 20112) How many times did “Michael E Mouse” answer?
3) How many of the email addresses were real (or even plausible – mostly I find that anything consisting of letters, ‘.’ and an ‘@’ are usually acceptable)
Oliver Payne says:
Trope & Liberman have some interesting papers on Construal Level Theory which broadly deals with the distance at which events occur and how that affects our opinions of them: ‘It’s happening to me/not me’, ‘now/not now’, ‘here/not here’, etc.
An example I remember off the top of my head is the ‘now’ construal of ‘reading a book’ is in the form of ‘turning pages’. The ‘not now’ (future) construal of ‘reading a book’ is in the form of ‘learning, knowledge’. Quite different.
The have a passage on the distance of online shopping, (also, online gambling) of which I cannot remember examples, but I think ‘price’ was engaged distally and ‘choice’ more proximally. I know there’s no direct read-across to online surveys, but I have a suspicion that the online survey’s perceived distance is partly responsible for the contributors’ apparent privacy incontinence.
That would explain the consistent willingness to answer freely across the three examples despite their different (fake) provenance. I would be interested to see if the respondents would be so louche in a face-to-face interview (although issues of reputation management may overshadow any distal-level effect).
31st of August, 2011Leigh Caldwell says:
Not sure that construal levels can explain this one – the evidence is that polite (and therefore, I would think, formal) conversation is construed as more distant than informal. This would suggest the official-looking CMU website would get more honest answers, while in fact the reverse was observed.
However I agree with you that more honesty is likely online than off, and this may well be partly down to a construal level explanation.
The price versus choice example is an interesting one – a paper presented last week at SPUDM suggested that enriched objects (those with lots of strong positive and negative attributes) are more likely to be chosen in distant construal than objects with few or neutral attributes; the reverse being true in proximate construal. My interpretation is that there is a “distal discounting” effect on negative attributes, or else a proximal weighting which is probably related to loss aversion.
1st of September, 2011