From psychological traits to safety warnings: three studies on recommendations in a smart home environment
This addresses user decision-making in smart home safety, but appears incremental in applying existing psychological concepts to this domain.
The paper investigated how psychological traits affect recommendation usage in smart home configuration, finding that detailed security explanations are more persuasive than simple warnings for privacy/security decisions.
In this paper, we report on three experiments we have carried out in the context of the EMPATHY project, with the aim of helping users make better configuration choices in a smart home environment, and discuss our results. We found that there are psychological traits, such as Need for Cognition, which influence the way individuals tend to use recommendations, that there are non obvious relationships between the perceived usefulness of recommendations in different domains and individuals' ability to exploit suggestions on configuration choices, and that detailed, easy-to-understand security explanations are more persuasive than simple security warnings, when it comes to make decisions on the applicability of rules which might cause privacy and security risks.