Abstract
In 1955, Solomon Asch investigated the relationship between opinions and social pressure. His results showed that opinions can be influenced by social pressure. In security, users are often referred to as the biggest security threat to a system. A system administrator’s security efforts can be, and have been, weakened by a user’s poor security decisions. Exploring conformity in security can help to discover if conformity exists in this setting and help to remedy the issue by determining why. This study repeats Asch’s experiment to discover if opinions can be influenced by social pressure in security related circumstances. This experiment differs from Asch’s because it takes place in a virtual room, the confederates are virtual beings, and the questions are related to passwords. This document will present the results of our experiment which will include the percentage of participants that conform, and the results from the interview after each session.
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Sherman, I.N., Williams, A., Alikhademi, K., Smarr, S., Roberts, A., Gilbert, J.E. (2019). What’s Your Password? Exploring Password Choice Conformity in Group Decision Making. In: Ahram, T., Nicholson, D. (eds) Advances in Human Factors in Cybersecurity. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 782. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94782-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94782-2_10
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