Psychological Evaluation of Human Choice Behavior in Socio-Technical Systems: A Rational Process Model Approach

Abstract : In the age of digital services and everyday smartphone usage, the issue of online privacy has gathered more and more interest for researchers, service providers and consumers. Assuming one’s digital information is private is equivalent to trusting service providers to handle one’s data in a certain way or ensuring protective measures against loss of privacy. When a consumer registers for an online service or installs a smartphone app, I assume an internal psychological process to relate the benefits of their decision to the risks associated with it. However, this process is considered to be subject of uncertainty. Therefore, decisions in a socio-technical environment can be viewed as decisions governed by a probabilistic amount of trust in an outcome, or, in other words, the amount of belief one holds that a hypothesis about future events will turn out to be true.