Popups: A Psychology Experiment
I recently came across this article that outlined an experiment performed by the Psychology Department of North Carolina State University.
In a nutshell, the participants were asked to watch something that mimiced loading of medical websites, and were asked questions about these sites. Thrown in for good measure were some fake popups, and the researchers were really only interested in how the participants would respond to these popups.
Now, I haven’t actually read the full experiment and its findings, so I can only go by what the article says. Apparently, the conclusion was that users are still clueless to popups because they’d click on them even when they’re fake. I’ll let you read the article yourself for the gory details.
I wonder whether the researchers considered the fact that people probably cared less about malware on public university computers, than their own. It’d be interesting to repeat the experiment, but the participants were required to view the websites on their own computer. Would they expect to see the same “idiocy” rate?