1Cademy - Adapting Security Warnings to Counter Misinformation

Concept

Adapting Security Warnings to Counter Misinformation - Crowdworker Study Methodology

Crowdworker study was used study the behavior effects of interstitial warnings
Recruited 238 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk and used a similar setup as laboratory study where participants had to answer questions about topics that were not talked about in the US, researchers paid attention to CTR and AVR and administered surveys, but treatment consisted of one of eight potential interstitial warnings
Using a multi-armed bandit algorithm to increase the chance that participants would encounter warnings that were deemed most/least informative and most/least effective at inducing fear of harm
Designed 8 interstitial warnings – 4 targeting information and 4 targeting fear of harm; information warnings contained detailed explanations and harm warnings used threatening and more extreme language to evoke fear
4 rounds of surveys asking participants why they decided on a result after each time they enter their answers before moving on to the next task
Treatment surveys had an extra step that asked if participants understood the purpose and presence of the warnings (choice of malware, information theft, disinformation) and whether they felt fearful or harmed by the warnings
Changes in behavior effects measured as the difference between the mean scores for informativeness and harm

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Updated 2021-05-12

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