Bottom-up psychosocial interventions for interdependent privacy: Effectiveness based on individual and content differences

Although a great deal of research has examined interventions to help users protect their own information online, less work has examined methods for reducing interdependent privacy (IDP) violations on social media (i.e., sharing of other people’s information). This study tested the effectiveness of concept-based (i.e., general information), fact-based (i.e., statistics), and narrative-based (i.e., stories) educational videos in altering IDP-relevant attitudes and multimedia sharing behaviors. Our study revealed concept and fact videos reduced sharing of social media content that portrayed people negatively. The narrative intervention backfired and increased sharing among participants who did not believe IDP violations to be especially serious; however, the narrative intervention decreased sharing for participants who rated IDP violations as more serious. Notably, our study found participants preferred narrative-based interventions with real world examples, despite other strategies more effectively reducing sharing. Implications for narrative transportation theory and advancing bottom-up (i.e., user-centered) psychosocial interventions are discussed.