Making Sense of the Perception of Security

Making Sense of the Perception of Security

We started out by teasing apart the security trade-off, and listing five areas where perception can diverge from reality:
The severity of the risk.
The probability of the risk.
The magnitude of the costs.
How effective the countermeasure is at mitigating the risk.
The trade-off itself.

Sometimes in all the areas, and all the time in area 4, we can explain this divergence as a consequence of not having enough information. But sometimes we have all the information and still make bad security trade-offs. My aim was to give you a glimpse of the complicated brain systems that make these trade-offs, and how they can go wrong.

Of course, we can make bad trade-offs in anything: predicting what snack we’d prefer next week or not being willing to pay enough for a beer on a hot day. But security trade-offs are particularly vulnerable to these biases because they are so critical to our survival. Long before our evolutionary ancestors had the brain capacity to consider future snack preferences or a fair price for a cold beer, they were dodging predators and forging social ties with others of their species. Our brain heuristics for dealing with security are old and well-worn, and our amygdalas are even older.

What’s new from an evolutionary perspective is large-scale human society, and the new security trade-offs that come with it. In the past I have singled out technology and the media as two aspects of modern society that make it particularly difficult to make good security trade-offs–technology by hiding detailed complexity so that we don’t have the right information about risks, and the media by producing such available, vivid, and salient sensory input–but the issue is really broader than that. The neocortex, the part of our brain that has to make security trade-offs, is, in the words of Daniel Gilbert, “still in beta testing.”

I have just started exploring the relevant literature in behavioral economics, the psychology of decision making, the psychology of risk, and neuroscience. Undoubtedly there is a lot of research out there for me still to discover, and more fascinatingly counterintuitive experiments that illuminate our brain heuristics and biases. But already I understand much more clearly why we get security trade-offs so wrong so often.

When I started reading about the psychology of security, I quickly realized that this research can be used both for good and for evil. The good way to use this research is to figure out how humans’ feelings of security can better match the reality of security. In other words, how do we get people to recognize that they need to question their default behavior? Giving them more information seems not to be the answer; we’re already drowning in information, and these heuristics are not based on a lack of information. Perhaps by understanding how our brains processes risk, and the heuristics and biases we use to think about security, we can learn how to override our natural tendencies and make better security trade-offs. Perhaps we can learn how not to be taken in by security theater, and how to convince others not to be taken in by the same.

The evil way is to focus on the feeling of security at the expense of the reality. In his book Influence,58 Robert Cialdini makes the point that people can’t analyze every decision fully; it’s just not possible: people need heuristics to get through life. Cialdini discusses how to take advantage of that; an unscrupulous person, corporation, or government can similarly take advantage of the heuristics and biases we have about risk and security. Concepts of prospect theory, framing, availability, representativeness, affect, and others are key issues in marketing and politics. They’re applied generally, but in today’s world they’re more and more applied to security. Someone could use this research to simply make people feel more secure, rather than to actually make them more secure.

After all my reading and writing, I believe my good way of using the research is unrealistic, and the evil way is unacceptable. But I also see a third way: integrating the feeling and reality of security.

The feeling and reality of security are different, but they’re closely related. We make the best security trade-offs–and by that I mean trade-offs that give us genuine security for a reasonable cost–when our feeling of security matches the reality of security. It’s when the two are out of alignment that we get security wrong.

In the past, I’ve criticized palliative security measures that only make people feel more secure as “security theater.” But used correctly, they can be a way of raising our feeling of security to more closely match the reality of security. One example is the tamper-proof packaging that started to appear on over-the-counter drugs in the 1980s, after a few highly publicized random poisonings. As a countermeasure, it didn’t make much sense. It’s easy to poison many foods and over-the-counter medicines right through the seal–with a syringe, for example–or to open and reseal the package well enough that an unwary consumer won’t detect it. But the tamper-resistant packaging brought people’s perceptions of the risk more in line with the actual risk: minimal. And for that reason the change was worth it.

Of course, security theater has a cost, just like real security. It can cost money, time, capabilities, freedoms, and so on, and most of the time the costs far outweigh the benefits. And security theater is no substitute for real security. Furthermore, too much security theater will raise people’s feeling of security to a level greater than the reality, which is also bad. But used in conjunction with real security, a bit of well-placed security theater might be exactly what we need to both be and feel more secure.

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