22/2/2016 – 14h – B013
From identity theft and fraud to corporate hacking attacks, cybersecurity has never been more important for businesses, organizations and governments. But if security and risk can be objectively defined (e.g., by analyzing objective data), risk perception is more important to explain human’s opinions, attitudes and in fine, our behaviors and decision of governments whatever the domain (e.g., the impact of potential health risks from exposure to power-frequency electromagnetic fields, the trust of drivers in autonomous cars, the attitudes towards robots in our daily environment). Risk perception is the subjective judgment that people make about the characteristics and severity of a risk. Risk perception is most commonly used in reference to natural-physical hazards and threats to the environment of health and security. Three major families of theory have been proposed to explain why different people make different estimates of the dangerousness of risks: (1) psychology approaches (heuristics and cognitive biases), (2) anthropology/sociology approaches (cultural theory and impact of organization safety culture) and (3) interdisciplinary approaches (social amplification of risk framework and the role of medias). In other words, the numerous technical advances in information sciences produce more secure environments; but information security cannot be understood or described as solely a technical problem. Human factors must be included because recent research shows that risk perceptions are mostly influenced by the emotional state of the perceiver/user.
Jerome Dinet is Professor of psychology in University of Lorraine (Lab InterPsy, EA4432). His research topics mainly concern human factors involved in human-machine interaction, and the behaviours and cognitive processes during information retrieval of users with specific needs (young children, seniors) and/or with impairments. He was invited professor in New York University (USA), in the National Advanced Institute of Science and Technology of Tsukaba (Japan), and in the University of Uppsala (Sweden). Currently, he is director of a new series entitled “Human-Machine Interaction” for ISTE-Wiley.
