Social Influence as Stimulus Control

Wisecrackers: A theory‐grounded investigation of phishing and pretext social engineering threats to information security

“…Milgram's (1983) landmark work on obedience to authority offered provocative evidence of the extent to which people will submit to commands of an authority figure. Obedience creates actions in deference to those who have perceived coercive power (Weatherly, Miller, & McDonald, 1999) such as in the case of one who can terminate a bank account or some valued privilege. Authority therefore can be used to engender fear, where people obey commands to avoid a negative consequence such as losing a privilege or something of value, punishment, humiliation, or condemnation (Milgram, 1983).…”

Gaining Access with Social Engineering: An Empirical Study of the Threat

“…Milgram's (1983) landmark work on obedience to authority offered provocative evidence of the extent to which people will submit to commands of an authority figure. Obedience creates actions in deference to those who have perceived coercive power (Weatherly, Miller, & McDonald, 1999), such as in the case of one who can terminate a bank account or some valued privilege. Authority therefore can be used to engender fear, where people obey commands to avoid a negative consequence such as losing a privilege or something of value, punishment, humiliation, or condemnation (Milgram, 1983).…”

“…Therefore, in some cases, people will readily comply with someone who "seems" authoritative while others remain skeptical and resist (Brehm, 1966;Donelson, 1973). When social engineers use authority to project fear or a threat, those who respond more readily and obediently to authority are more likely to comply with these requests than people who are more skeptical and remain defiant (Weatherly et al, 1999). Therefore, we hypothesize that:…”

“…For the questionnaire, we drew from Allen and Meyer's (1990) items for commitments, Gendall (2005) for trust, and Lindsey (2005) and Weatherly, Miller, and McDonald's (1999) for obedience to authority and reactance/ resistance. We also gathered self-report items for dependent variables to determine their correlation with the objective observations of subjective social engineering behaviors.…”

A Relational Frame Theory Contribution to Social Categorization

“…This account depends on the contextual control of stimuli, a topic of familiar concern to the behavior analytic community (e.g., Guerin, 2005;McGlinchey & Keenan, 1997;Weatherly, Miller, & McDonald, 1999). In this particular study, contextual control was demonstrated when the relational responses of participants generalized to the novel stimulus sets on the basis of their topographical dimensions (horizontal or vertical lines).…”