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How does information about a person's past, accessed now, affect individuals' impressions of that person? In 2 survey experiments and 2 experiments with actual incentives, we compare whether, when evaluating a person, information about that person's past greedy or immoral behaviors is discounted similarly to information about her past generous or moral behaviors. We find that, no matter how far in the past a person behaved greedily or immorally, information about her negative behaviors is hardly discounted at all. In contrast, information about her past positive behaviors is discounted heavily: recent behaviors are much more influential than behaviors that occurred a long time ago. The lesser discounting of information about immoral and greedy behaviors is not caused by these behaviors being more influential, memorable, extreme, or attention-grabbing; rather, they are perceived as more diagnostic of a person's character than past moral or generous behaviors. The phenomenon of differential discounting of past information has particular relevance in the digital age, where information about people's past is easily retrieved. Our findings have significant implications for theories of impression formation and social information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record

The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk has suffered from slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participant non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk but providing access to new and more naïve populations. After surveying several options, we empirically examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). In two studies, we found that participants on both platforms were more naïve and less dishonest compared to MTurk participants. Across the three platforms, CF provided the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF's and comparable to MTurk's. ProA and CF participants were also much more diverse than participants from MTurk.

Among the many factors that can elicit privacy concerns and affect privacy behavior, some are sensorial: detecting the presence of others through our senses. Human beings may be wired to react to sensorial cues and rely, in part, on them to assess the privacy ramifications of their actions. Individuals may react to sensorial cues indicating the presence of others even when those cues do not carry relevant information about likely consequences of privacy choices – and thus, from a normative perspective, may not be expected to influence privacy concerns and resulting behaviors. In four experiments (N = 829), we examine the effect on privacy-relevant behavior (the disclosure of sensitive personal information) of four sensorial cues signaling the presence of other humans: proximity, visual, auditory, and olfactory, each signaling the presence of another person. Proximity and visual cues (Experiments 1 and 2) produced an inhibitory effect on intimate self-disclosures in an online survey – including when that presence does not and cannot materially affect participants’ risks or benefits associated with disclosure (Experiment 2). Auditory and olfactory cues (Experiments 3 and 4), however, did not. The findings point to a possible influence of sensorial (specifically, visual) cues on privacy behavior. We discuss the implications of the findings in the context of privacy and security decision making in a digital age, where physical cues human beings may have adapted to use for detection of threats may be absent, or even strategically manipulated by antagonistic third parties.

We test the hypothesis that increasing individuals’ perceived control over the release and access of private information—even information that allows them to be personally identified––will increase their willingness to disclose sensitive information. If their willingness to divulge increases sufficiently, such an increase in control can, paradoxically, end up leaving them more vulnerable. Our findings highlight how, if people respond in a sufficiently offsetting fashion, technologies designed to protect them can end up exacerbating the risks they face.