I’ve been studying people more or less my entirely adult life, and I can summarise all that knowledge and experience down into three words:
People are weird.
Cool, interesting, amazing, terrifying, awful (in both senses of the word), but weird. Both individually and collectively, we just naturally defy categories. Sure, we’re a sexually dimorphic species… except not really. We think abstractly and reason, but honestly a lot of that is a patina over ad-hoc emotional knee-jerk reactions… until it isn’t. We’re intensely tribal, but the “tribes” we form are semi-random and often deeply unstable, and any individual tends to belong to multiple tribes, sometimes with conflicting values or goals. Basically every broad descriptor of humankind beyond the extreme basics of “breathes oxygen” and “needs food and water to live” always has a little asterisk next to it, in which we usually do the thing, unless we don’t. The cognitive psychology researchers – who are among the smartest and most rigorous people I have ever spoken to – have been working for years to try to work out how we work even on a basic level, and they’re still pretty confused. I’m assured they’ve worked some stuff out, but honestly it’s a bit beyond me, and I do see plenty of findings fail to replicate (I think. The mathematics on that stuff is pretty hard to follow, honestly.).
Honestly it’s part of what makes psychology just so interesting to me. Physics is cool, no doubt, but at the end of the day a rock’s going to do what a rock’s more or less always done. People do stuff that completely contradicts what they did yesterday, and if you question them as to why they’ll think you’re the weird one. Carbon’s going to react more or less the same with oxygen regardless of what you think about it, while people give totally different responses depending on the shoes you’re wearing.
True story, when I was doing interviews for my Masters, I quickly learned I had to wear the exact same clothes every time because it made a noticeable difference in the answers I got. Literally, a different coloured shirt of the same style made people talk for about 5 minutes more or less, but I guarantee you that none of the interviewees consciously noticed (and before you ask, yes, I did keep track of the length over multiple trials. I was transcribing the interviews from audio recordings so it was very noticeable).
So when I see a lot of research claiming to have identified a “paradox” in human behaviour, it’s not as surprising as you might think. Oh, look, people are contradictory and don’t act perfectly rationally. News at 11.
So what is the privacy paradox?
The “privacy paradox” is basically the observation that people say they care about their privacy and controlling their personal information, but then go out and behave as if they don’t. And there’s been a few attempts to explain it, and I’ll go over those, but honestly I think there’s two main errors happening.
How you ask the question will determine the answer you get. If I’m trying to measure health, I can do a lot of different things: I can measure blood pressure, heart rate (resting or elevated), blood sugar levels, performance on fitness tests, asking if you have any serious medical issues, testing for serious medical issues, lung capacity, blood oxygen saturation, ability to perform intense cognitive tasks, physical resilience, psychological resilience, levels of social connection or any of dozens or hundreds of other legitimate measures. Depending on what questions I’m trying to answer, some are going to be more justifiable than others. But someone who defines “healthy” as “having X blood sugar after Y hours of fasting” is going to get very different answers than someone who defines healthy as “being able to perform the daily tasks required for a functional life”. That’s just how epistemology works. And a lot of research doesn’t “find” that that’s how people work, they just kind of assume it and go about trying to identify how we value different things so they can put the variables in their equations to predict the behaviour-vector. This perspective isn’t wrong, as such, but it comes with certain unavoidable limitations.
People don’t place a consistent value on the same thing, and tend to value lots of different things in different ways. In some ways Facebook is a net negative on my life – makes me feel icky, makes me a less patient person, and I can usually contact the people in my life in other ways. But in other ways it’s a net positive – makes it easier for me to keep in contact with certain people or to get into contact with new people or organisations, or to make centralised announcements to pre-determined groups. Which one is more salient depends on the context I’m making the decision; how easy is it for me to get into contact with someone otherwise? How important is it that I get in contact with them? Am I trying to get into contact with someone new, or keep up with developments in my friend’s lives? These are all going to vary widely depending on the exact situation I’m in, in ways that are hard to capture in a real-life setting, and almost impossible in a lab setting. And those are just the variables I can think of and have conscious access to – remember, a lot of our reasoning isn’t easily consciously available because we’re basically monkeys who are really good at pretending to have big brains.
But I’ll get to those as we go. Let’s take a look at some of the research surrounding this topic, shall we?
(Just a note, it’s not a “paradox” in the traditional sense, rather refers to an apparent contradiction. Alliteration is amusing for academics, I anticipate agreement.)
Research
The “privacy paradox” was named by Norberg, Horne and Horne in 2007, and since then it’s kind of taken off. See, there’s an idea in behavioural economics called “revealed preferences”, in which you infer the value people place on a thing by what they are willing to pay for it. Essentially, if I give you a chocolate bar in exchange for a pencil, I value the chocolate bar – at that time, in that context – as at most as much as I value the pencil. By making that exchange, I have revealed that I would prefer to have the pencil than the chocolate bar.
(This gets much more complicated with labour and cash, but let’s keep it simple.)
By that same reasoning, if you say “I’ll show you my cool collection of cat pictures, but only if you tell me your middle name”, and I agree, then I have revealed that I prefer to see cat pictures than hide my middle name from you. If you make it clear that you will or might tell other people my middle name, then I’ve made that choice as well.
The “privacy paradox” refers to the phenomenon in which people say “I place a high value on nobody knowing my middle name” but then flocking down to the cat picture stand. It’s important to note that people doing this are not lying (necessarily), they really do experience subjective value of middle-name-privacy, and might take steps in their day-to-day life to hide their middle names. But when the prospect of the tiny toe-beans arises, they ultimately make the choice to trade, sometimes without the slightest anxiety or reflection before doing so. This isn’t a conscious “Oh, I place value on X, but I gain more value from giving up X to gain Y, so I make the trade”, but rather “Oooh, cat pictures, gimme!”
I’m presenting this as an in-person event for simplicity, but obviously for our purposes we’re more often talking about online scenarios. Like I know Facebook is bad for privacy, and I value privacy, but I have a Facebook account on which I might post quite personal details. I know Google is invasive, but I still use Maps. (Although those aren’t great examples; the vast majority of work deals only in explicit disclosures rather than the kind of invisible harvesting the privacy “community” is usually more worried about.)
From an economics perspective this is all very straightforward if not outright axiomatic – they made the trade, therefore they value thusly – but from a psychological perspective this obviously is a contradiction. Peoples values do shift somewhat based on context, but this is a pretty serious one. And even if we just attribute it to different contextual cues, psychologists just ask “OK, but what is it about the context that gives rise to this particular value configuration?”. Because while revealed preferences is a great way to describe people’s behaviour, it doesn’t give any explanation as to why they behave that way. Just saying “they did it because they valued thusly” is less than useful, especially then “valued thusly” is defined as “they did it”.
It’s noteworthy that the overwhelming majority of research on this topic works from the perspective of what’s called the “privacy calculus model”, which is a subset of what’s sometimes called the “rational choice model”. Basically, it posits that we’re rational or semi-rational actors making trade-off calculations in a nonrandom fashion. I’m very unlikely to pay $1000 for a bottle of water when I have tap water available for a few cents a few steps away in my kitchen unless I have a compelling reason, for example. But if you put me on a desert island where water is very scarce, I may well make that trade. The “privacy calculus model” basically says the same thing, but treats perceived privacy/personal information as a good to be traded/bought/sold.
(Anyone who points out “but people aren’t perfectly rational!” will be forced to wear a dunce cap and sit in the Making Obvious Points That Don’t Help corner. This perspective only posits that we don’t act totally randomly, we seem to have pretty-consistent preferences that are rarely violated without pretty clear reasons. This is, again, obviously far from a perfect description of people, but this is why we don’t rely on any one model to describe something as complicated as people.
You might notice my tone is quite irritable there. The reason is because roughly 99.99% of the time someone makes that observation, what they’re actually saying is “people are stupid”, with the implication that they are smarter than everyone else, or occasionally “you’re stupid because you don’t recognise this blindly obvious fact so I have to point this out to you”. Occasionally you do get the “people don’t make sense so psychology and behavioural neuroscience are not viable as sciences”, which is at least more nuanced as a position.)
But why though?
There’s been several attempts to resolve this. One of the more successful ones was Kehr and colleagues who examined the role of trust of the platform (e.g. Facebook, our cat-picture purveyor), and what they called “momentary affective states” which is basically brief emotions usually created by sensory experiences. So if you look at a well-designed website – maybe it has a picture of a very cute cat on the landing page – you experience a small, brief feeling of pleasure, which can help override your usual privacy preference. This finding is very similar to that found by Aiello and colleagues – people were more willing to provide personal information if they viewed the company they were buying from as friendly and trustworthy. This makes sense, if you think about it; there’s a big difference between handing over some information to someone you trust vs someone you don’t. So the question for companies is how they can cause you to trust them even when you know you really shouldn’t?
In addition, remember that a lot of (not all!) human “reasoning” is post-hoc justification to emotional twitches in our monkey-brains. I see a person wearing a t-shirt with a snake on it, snakes scare me, I feel scared, I then form impressions that the person is scary or maybe that kind of person is scary, which I then justify with whatever nonsense I can scrape up.
(I’m not going to provide real-world examples here. I’m sure you can come up with some on your own. As a fun growing-as-a-person exercise, think of a group you tend to dislike or disagree with, and list all the reasons you dislike them, and ask yourself; did you know these factors before you disliked them, or did you latch onto them after you developed a dislike? You probably won’t be able to, this is intensely difficult as an exercise, but give it a try anyway. This is part of why I’m intensely sceptical whenever I see one of those articles that say “Disfavoured Group X Has Bad Quality!” Even if they’re citing the research correctly – rare – and the work has been done properly in the first place, somehow free from this bias on the part of the researchers – also rare – the entire motivation for publishing and sharing it around is to provide an in-group with post-hoc reasons to dislike Group X.)
So people are presented with a scenario that creates the perception of warmth and trustworthiness, which we know tends to change how we evaluate benefits, costs and risks. In addition, people do not simply “go to website, brain flips a bit, give up personal information” otherwise in a vacuum – people are working within a particular broader context of beliefs and trade-offs. I may know Facebook is bad for my privacy, but I want to keep up with all my friends/connect with certain groups or individuals, which is increasingly hard to do outside of centralised platforms like Facebook/Discord/Twitter/whatever. In addition, it’s not like not having an account makes that much of a difference what with them collecting as much information about you as they can anyway, so the “marginal cost” is not as high as you might intuitively think. Further, standing out is hard, psychologically. Oh, we all like to feel special, but we hate being apart from the crowd. Social connection has been suggested to reduce the intensity of chronic pain, pretty significantly, while social isolation or disconnectedness has been suggested to hit some of the same neurological parts involved in tracking harm or pain. Social disconnection has been found to impair recovery from serious psychiatric illness. And as anyone who has missed out on a social event with friends because you’re not part of the right Facebook chat can tell you, even though they don’t mean to and you know that, it’s really hard not to feel excluded in that case. And being excluded sucks. So the “cost to not using Facebook” can be a lot higher than a lot of people might immediately grasp.
(And of course there’s the usual problems of if you have to use a privacy-invasive platform for work, and suchforth. True story: I used to do a lot of tutoring, and I had to be on Facebook to moderate a class group, answer questions, and the like as a condition of my employment, and as a student you kind of rely on tutoring to make money.)
So that’s one way people can act in contradiction to their values. But, as I noted at the start, people are complicated.
Another thing to consider is that beliefs and attitudes can be considered behaviours (“believe” is a verb, after all). Me believing that coffee is delicious is not some abstract fact of the universe, it’s a behaviour I’m doing, albeit with limited conscious choice on the topic and in a way that is objectively correct. In the same way, me believing that it’s creepy if Meta tracks my private medical information is a behaviour I am engaging in, albeit one that derives from basic intuitions and temperaments and with good reasons supporting it. So the question is, why do we engage in that particular behaviour in that particular context?
Self-signalling
The idea of “social signalling” gets a bad rap sometimes. We view it as inherently dishonest, and sure, that’s definitely possible – someone who pretends to be something they’re not to gain social attention is lying. But we also signal to ourselves – I do things, in part, to convince myself that I am a certain kind of person. This is partially why, even though it’d be impossible for someone else to know, I don’t fantasise about torturing animals – apart from the thought distressing me, I don’t want to be the kind of person who thinks about that stuff, even if nobody else will ever possibly know. Sometimes people will see this and try to say “well, someone who does that is more likely to do bad things” and yes that might be true, but that always sounds a bit hollow to me. I have no intention of ever torturing an animal barring an extremely good reason, and I think that’s a sufficient deviation from my current values that it’s unlikely to be something I’ll just drift into. Thinking about it violates my self-image.
So, it seems plausible that “valuing privacy” is a behaviour that – in part – helps individuals create a certain kind of self-image. It’s kind of similar to people who say they value honesty, but then get angry when people tell them an unpleasant truth – they’re not “lying” as such, they’re not saying something they know to be untrue with the intention of deceiving you, nor would I say they’re mistaken. They wish to view themselves as someone who values honesty (because really, people who don’t are not generally viewed as good people), but they also don’t like to hear unpleasant truths (because, you know, that’s what “unpleasant” means). So the two behaviours do kind of contradict each other, because they’re created by different factors and are trying to achieve different things.
So we come back to the issue we started with, which is how you define “valuing”. The behavioural economists define it in behavioural terms – to value something is to engage in trade with it, or to turn down the opportunity to do so. If I trade X for Y, then I value X less than Y, while if I don’t trade X for Y, then I value X more than Y. That is valuation, and again, if all you’re looking to do is to describe a behaviour, that’s a really great way to do it. But you cannot explain it in that framework, because it’s circular.
That’s a very limited overview of some of the work around the “privacy paradox”, but I think that’s covered enough for one day – I’ll probably come back to it later. I barely touched on the questions of deceitful practices or limited choice to engage with these services (mobile phones are tracking devices, but just try to get by without one for more than a few days). But there’s almost a kind of implicit sneer in a lot of the work I’ve read, especially those who find that people don’t engage in that kind of semi-rational calculus, the idea that the people who behave contrary to the theory are either a) lying, or b) stupid. And honestly, I think a lot of that is from a limited perspective; any work is inherently going to be limited, you can only measure so many people in whatever contexts taking into account so many variables, and a lot of those variables confound each other and aren’t necessarily consciously available. Say it with me again: People are weird.
Side points?
One more point, and this is less me telling you stuff and me musing out loud. A lot of these works – heck, a lot of psychology studies overall – are fundamentally quantitative; they work with numerical variables and how they relate to each other over a large number of people. And that’s a perfectly fine paradigm to work within! If I’m curious how, say, the temperature affects people’s aggression, a quantitative study is a great way to engage with that question. But at the end of the day, while psychology definitely measures groups of people to gain insight, it’s fundamentally about the individual. And an individual is deeply complicated, with nuances and aspects that are hard to capture if you’re just using a bunch of numeric scales. For example; I have certain thoughts and attitudes about astronomy, and while you could capture how strongly positive or negative those thoughts are quantitatively, you’re going to miss out on a lot of the colour and nuance of those views if you only take that approach. For some purposes, that’s totally fine, but there’s a big difference between “I have chosen to miss out on that information for these considered reasons” and flat-out not considering those other perspectives at all.
Qualitative work has a long tradition in psychology, but has made up a small fraction of the research being done over the last 50 years or so. Partially because it’s hard and complicated and doesn’t scale well so tends to fall prey to sampling problems, partially because it takes a lot longer, and partially because it just doesn’t really address certain questions very well. But what it does do very well is allow you to explore a phenomenon that doesn’t really seem to have a lot of apparent coherence – by talking to people and really drilling down into their views, you can get insights from one qualitative study that dozens of quantitative studies can never really have, the data is so much more rich and informative.
There’s a view that qualitative is a great baseline – when you’re starting out in an area, you start with qualitative work until you have enough understanding to start scaling up the size or complexity, which is where quantitative work is really good. And that’s not a bad perspective, you can get a lot of insights there – basically the whole field of personality psychology started that way, and that’s pretty useful. But they are distinct approaches that complement each other, rather than competitors. No matter how far you get into a certain field, neither view will ever give a complete answer, at least not with people.
Because people are so deeply, amazingly, frustratingly hilariously weird.