TITLE:
Appraising the Manifestation of Optimism Bias and Its Impact on Human Perception of Cyber Security: A Meta Analysis
AUTHORS:
Khaled M. Alnifie, Charles Kim
KEYWORDS:
Cyber Security, Meta-Analysis, Optimistic Bias, Optimism Bias, Risk Perception, Cognitive Bias
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Information Security,
Vol.14 No.2,
February
23,
2023
ABSTRACT: Cyber threats and risks are
increasing exponentially with time. For preventing and defense against these
threats and risks, precise risk perception for effective mitigation is the
first step. Risk perception is necessary requirement to mitigate risk as it
drives the security strategy at the organizational level and human attitude at
individual level. Sometime, individuals understand there is a risk that a
negative event or incident can occur, but they do not believe there will be a
personal impact if the risk comes to realization but instead, they believe that
the negative event will impact others. This belief supports the common belief
that individuals tend to think of themselves as invulnerable, i.e., optimistically bias about the
situation, thus affecting their attitude for taking preventive measures due to
inappropriate risk perception or overconfidence. The main
motivation of this meta-analysis is to assess that how the cyber
optimistic bias or cyber optimism bias affects individual’s cyber security risk
perception and how it changes their decisions. Applying a meta-analysis, this
study found that optimistic bias has an overall negative impact on the cyber
security due to the inappropriate risk perception and considering themselves invulnerable
by biasing that the threat will not occur to
them. Due to the cyber optimism bias, the individual will sometimes share
passwords by considering it will not be maliciously used, lack in adopting of
preventive measures, ignore security incidents, wrong perception of cyber
threats and overconfidence on themselves in the context of cyber security.