A User-Centered Approach to Phishing Susceptibility: The Role of a Suspicious Personality in Protecting Against Phishing

Generalized communicative suspicion (GCS) has been implicated in the deception literature as a trait that causes individuals to believe they can accurately detect deception in face-to-face settings. Separately, the online deception literature has implicated users' heuristic processing as the reason for them failing to recognize deception and falling prey to cybercrimes like phishing attacks. Such online deception work, however, has yet to explore how GCS might affect individual abilities to detect deception in a mediated context. The current work connects these two streams of research by introducing information insufficiency as a mediator between GCS and processing and extending it to the phishing context. We find that high GCS increases uncertainty and leads to a desire for more information before making a judgment. Desiring more information leads to systematically processing available information and more accurate phishing deception detection.