Blissfully Ignorant: The Effects of General Privacy Concerns, General Institutional Trust, and Affect in the Privacy Calculus

Existing research on information privacy has mostly relied on the privacy calculus model, which views privacy-related decision-making as a rational process where individuals weigh the anticipated risks of disclosing personal data against the potential benefits. In this research, we develop an extension to the privacy calculus model, arguing that the situation-specific assessment of risks and benefits is bounded by (1) pre-existing attitudes or dispositions, such as general privacy concerns or general institutional trust, and (2) limited cognitive resources and heuristic thinking. An experimental study, employing two samples from the USA and Switzerland, examined consumer responses to a new smartphone application that collects driving behavior data and provided converging support for these predictions. Specifically, the results revealed that a situation-specific assessment of risks and benefits fully mediates the effect of dispositional factors on information disclosure. In addition, the results showed that privacy assessment is influenced by momentary affective states, indicating that consumers underestimate the risks of information disclosure
when confronted with a user interface that elicits positive affect.