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Abstract In an age of digital economy with increasing technological sophistication, individuals are more aware than ever of the risks to their privacy. Not surprisingly, users’ privacy behaviors have become a global high-profile issue. Researchers in the field of Information Systems (IS) have conducted valuable explorations around the topic of users’ privacy behaviors. However, the findings are still inconclusive, which limits our understanding of users’ privacy behaviors at a deep level. With various technical advantages, social science research has increasingly adopted cognitive neuroscience methods to reveal new insights to solve dilemmas, including the ones related to information privacy. Therefore, based on the review of privacy behavior research in the high-quality IS journals and the analysis of the advantages of cognitive neuroscience methods, this article proposes a new research framework of neuroprivacy and discusses four potential research directions.
First, via rigorous literature retrieval and screening, we obtain 95 articles related to users’ privacy behaviors published in the ten mainstream journals in IS field. With these articles, we analyze the development of privacy behavior research in terms of research themes, methods, and revolution information technologies. Then, we draw the core idea of dual-process theories to integrate the main theoretical lenses and key constructs discussed in these articles, by which we discuss the research status and reveal four gaps in IS privacy behavior research. Next, we depict the features of the three commonly used cognitive neuroscience tool categories: neurophysiology (e.g., eye tracking, skin conductance response, etc.), neuroimaging (e.g., EEG, fMRI, etc.), and neuroregulation (e.g., TMS, tDCS, etc.). Finally, we discuss the advantages of applying cognitive neuroscience methods to privacy research, which provides new insights for addressing the four research gaps in extant IS privacy studies.
Via reviewing and analyzing prior literature and neuroscience tools, we propose a new research framework of neuroprivacy that applies the advantages of cognitive neuroscience theories and technologies to explain users’ privacy behaviors and the underlying mechanisms from the neural and physiological views. Specifically, drawing on the perspective of dual-process theories, the neuroprivacy framework includes systematic and heuristic processing as two underlying mechanisms of users’ privacy behaviors. In addition, it also takes the neural circuit activities and functional connections of trust and other complex constructs as entry points to discuss the interaction between cognition and emotion and thus synchronize systematic-heuristic dual processing mechanisms to explain users’ privacy behaviors. Based on the proposed neuroprivacy framework, we further discuss four potential future research directions of neuroprivacy: (1) objectively measure key privacy constructs and build their associations with neural activities; (2) deconstruct complex privacy behaviors from the perspective of dynamic neural activity processes; (3) explore the neural activity evidence of automatic and unconscious heuristic processing in users’ privacy behaviors; (4) integrate the two cognitive mechanisms, systematic and heuristic processing, to improve the theoretical explanation of users’ privacy behaviors.
The rapid growth of cognitive neuroscience tools ushers in the forefront of information privacy research—neuroprivacy. We hope that the framework and agenda of neuroprivacy proposed in this paper can provide reference and inspiration for scholars to carry out more insightful research on neuroprivacy.
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Published: 31 August 2022
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