Impulsivity and Information Disclosure: Implications for Privacy Paradox

Abstract

Privacy paradox refers to the inconsistency that sometimes exists between individuals’ expressed privacy concern and the willingness to divulge personal information. Several arguments have been proposed to explain the inconsistency. One set of arguments centers around the effects of individual differences in personality characteristics, e.g., the Big Five. In the current article, we examine the role of a personality characteristic, impulsivity, in explaining the relationship between privacy concern and information disclosure. We report the results of a survey-based study that consisted of two hundred and forty-two (242) usable responses from subjects recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results show that one of the three dimensions of impulsivity, motor impulsivity, directly influences the extent of information disclosure, and, also moderates the relationship between privacy concern and information disclosure. Furthermore, our study shows impulsivity explains more variance in information disclosure than explained by the Big Five factors only.