• Advertise
• Search
• Members
• Free Magazines
• Newest Links
• Categories
• Register
• Login

The Psychology of Security

Added by Papergrl

Description: This essay is my initial attempt to explore the feeling of security: where it comes from, how it works, and why it diverges from the reality of security. Four fields of research—two very closely related—can help illuminate this issue. The first is behavioral economics, sometimes called behavioral finance. Behavioral economics looks at human biases—emotional, social, and cognitive—and how they affect economic decisions. The second is the psychology of decision-making, and more specifically bounded rationality, which examines how we make decisions. Neither is directly related to security, but both look at the concept of risk: behavioral economics more in relation to economic risk, and the psychology of decision-making more generally in terms of security risks. But both fields go a long way to explain the divergence between the feeling and the reality of security and, more importantly, where that divergence comes from.