Culture and cyber security: How cultural tightness-looseness moderates the effects of threat and coping appraisals on mobile cyber hygiene

• Main Author: HOE, Kok Wei
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Cultural; Tightness; Cyber; Hygiene; Protection; Motivation; China; Business Administration, Management, and Operations; Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/357; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1354&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

With increasing adoption of smartphone for mobile-commerce and increasing incidents of cyber breaches, it is timely to investigate how the weakest link in this security chain, human, can be strengthened. To date, there has been a gap in research examining the impact of culture on protection motivation. Most extant research focus on technological, organizational and behavioral factors affecting protection motivation. In this study, I develop a model integrating Theory of Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Protective Motivation Theory to investigate how cultural norms, define as shared expectations and rules that guide behavior of people within social groups, affect a person’s intentions to adopt protective measures on their devices. Using the Cultural Tightness-Looseness theory, I hypothesize that cultural norms provide important indications to an individual’s evaluations of threat and coping strategies. My study weaves extant research adopting Protection Motivation Theory to investigate information security behaviors, to determine how social influences of the environment (as explained by theory of Cultural Tightness-Looseness) and psychology of the individual (as explained by Protection Motivation Theory) interact and determine the eventual individual security behavior. The study is conducted over 31 provinces of China, and expands extant research beyond desktop computers to smartphones, and organization setting to the personal phone user, where it is up to the individual motivation and cultural environment to be aware of cyber threats, understand cyber risk, and take protective actions against cyber breaches. The findings of this study contributes towards developing more comprehensive and systematic measures and messaging to motivate individual to adopt protective measures on their devices.