Evaluating the Core and Full Protection Motivation Theory Nomologies for the Voluntary Adoption of Password Manager Applications

Abstract

The protection motivation theory (PMT) is widely used in behavioral information security research, with multiple instantiations of the theoretical model applied in the literature. The purpose of this study is to perform a theoretical (conceptual) replication of both the core and full (PMT) nomologies in the context of voluntary password manager application use for individual home end-users. In our study, the full PMT model explained more variance than the core PMT model, but the relationships between multiple behavioral antecedents differed between the core and full PMT models, possibly due to differences in model complexity. Our findings suggest that researchers should justify the version of the PMT that they choose to use based on their research objectives with the understanding that the same variables may be significant in one version of the PMT but not significant in another version of the PMT.

Looking Back and Moving Forward: How psychological and demographic factors affect consumer behaviors amid the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The basic assumption of PMT is that the intention of the general public to adopt protective health measures is significantly influenced by high levels of fear or perceived threat, and by perceptions of efficacy. Thus, the two major constructs in the original PMT/core PMT are perceived threat and efficacy (Aurigemma et al, 2019). Perceived threat means that if people perceive the disease is severe and the likelihood to be infected is high, they are more concerned about the impacts of disease infection and are more likely to adopt protective measures.…”

E-waste information security protection motivation: the role of optimism bias

“…According to PMT, threat and coping appraisals determine an individual's motivation to cope with information security risks of e-waste. Considering that the full or core version of the PMT model should be chosen to use based on their research objectives, and researches should not always build off the full PMT nomology (Aurigemma et al , 2019), we only selected certain core concepts to explain the e-waste information security behaviors in this paper. Threat appraisal is captured with a perceived threat, and coping appraisal is represented by self-efficacy to cope with the threat.…”

Know Your Enemy: User Segmentation Based on Human Aspects of Information Security

“…Furthermore, studies report that students are a comparable population to "non-students" [50] and that they can be considered as a valid population for experiments in this field [51]. It is also important that lack of information security awareness prevails among students which makes them well suited for information security research [52].…”