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Human actions or lack thereof contribute to a large majority of cybersecurity incidents. Traditionally, when looking for advice on cybersecurity questions, people have turned to search engines or social sites like Reddit. The rapid adoption of chatbot technologies is offering a potentially more direct way of getting similar advice. Initial research suggests, however, that while chatbot answers to common cybersecurity questions tend to be fairly accurate, they may not be very effective as they often fall short on other desired qualities such as understandability, actionability, or motivational power. Research in this area thus far has been limited to the evaluation by researchers themselves on a small number of synthetic questions. This article reports on what we believe to be the first in situ evaluation of a cybersecurity Question Answering (QA) assistant. We also evaluate a prompt engineered to help the cybersecurity QA assistant generate more effective answers. The study involved a 10-day deployment of a cybersecurity QA assistant in the form of a Chrome extension. Collectively, participants (N=51) evaluated answers generated by the assistant to over 1,000 cybersecurity questions they submitted as part of their regular day-to-day activities. The results suggest that a majority of participants found the assistant useful and often took actions based on the answers they received. In particular, the study indicates that prompting successfully improved the effectiveness of answers and, in particular, the likelihood that users follow their recommendations (fraction of participants who actually followed the advice was 0.514 with prompting vs. 0.402 without prompting, p=4.61E-04), an impact on people’s actual behavior. We provide a detailed analysis of data collected in this study, discuss their implications, and outline next steps in the development and deployment of effective cybersecurity QA assistants that offer the promise of changing actual user behavior and of reducing human-related security incidents.
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Measuring Political Knowledge and Not Search Proficiency in Online Surveys
Most online survey questions testing political knowledge are susceptible to measurement error when participants look up the answers. This article reports five studies of methods to detect and prevent this common source of error. To detect lookups, “catch questions” are more reliable than self-reports, because many participants lie rather than admit looking up answers. Strongly worded instructions reduced lookups by about two-thirds, while the triple combination of instructions, requesting a promise not to look up answers, and adaptive feedback (asking participants who look up an answer to stop doing so) reduced the percentage of respondents looking up an answer by a further half, to 3%. For office recall knowledge items, photo-based open-ended questions eliminated lookups and had similar validity to traditional text-based versions, making them a good choice when a visual format is viable.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1835022
- PAR ID:
- 10334060
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International journal of public opinion research
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1471-6909
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Human actions or lack thereof contribute to a large majority of cybersecurity incidents. Traditionally, when looking for advice on cybersecurity questions, people have turned to search engines or social sites like Reddit. The rapid adoption of chatbot technologies is offering a potentially more direct way of getting similar advice. Initial research suggests, however, that while chatbot answers to common cybersecurity questions tend to be fairly accurate, they may not be very effective as they often fall short on other desired qualities such as understandability, actionability, or motivational power. Research in this area thus far has been limited to the evaluation by researchers themselves on a small number of synthetic questions. This article reports on what we believe to be the first in situ evaluation of a cybersecurity Question Answering (QA) assistant. We also evaluate a prompt engineered to help the cybersecurity QA assistant generate more effective answers. The study involved a 10-day deployment of a cybersecurity QA assistant in the form of a Chrome extension. Collectively, participants (N=51) evaluated answers generated by the assistant to over 1,000 cybersecurity questions they submitted as part of their regular day-to-day activities. The results suggest that a majority of participants found the assistant useful and often took actions based on the answers they received. In particular, the study indicates that prompting successfully improved the effectiveness of answers and, in particular, the likelihood that users follow their recommendations (fraction ofparticipants who actually followed the advice was 0.514 with prompting vs. 0.402 without prompting, p=4.61E-04), an impacton people’s actual behavior. We provide a detailed analysis of data collected in this study, discuss their implications, and outline next steps in the development and deployment of effective cybersecurity QA assistants that offer the promise of changing actual user behavior and of reducing human-related security incidents.more » « less
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Abstract Burgeoning evidence suggests that when children observe data, they use knowledge of the demonstrator's intent to augment learning. We propose that the effects of social learning may go beyond cases where children observe data, to cases where they receive no new information at all. We present a model of how simply asking a question a second time may lead to belief revision, when the questioner is expected to know the correct answer. We provide an analysis of the CHILDES corpus to show that these neutral follow‐up questions are used in parent–child conversations. We then present three experiments investigating 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's reactions to neutral follow‐up questions posed by ignorant or knowledgeable questioners. Children were more likely to change their answers in response to a neutral follow‐up question from a knowledgeable questioner than an ignorant one. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of common practices in legal, educational, and experimental psychological settings.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edac002
