The Pride and Prejudice of Privacy - How consumers' intentions to share private information are affected by emotions.

Abstract

Current papers suggest that if emotions have the power to affect consumers’ privacy concerns, consumers are at risk of being exploited by companies and unauthorized users taking advantage of consumers’ emotional stages. Therefore, suggesting that emotions are critical elements in the context of privacy as they construct the divide between disclosing and protecting an individual’s privacy. This research was conducted to test the emotions of guilt and pride’s effect on consumers’ intention to disclose private information. An experiment was designed to understand if a causal relationship between the dependent variables of guilt and pride exists with the dependent variable intention to disclose, by manipulating the dependent variables to evoke priming emotions. The result implies that emotions have a positive impact on consumers’ intentions to disclose private information. A pleasant feeling of pride is more acceptable for consumers to feel, while guilt is unpleasantly directing consumers to correct or ignore past behaviour to escape and avoid further impact on the intention to share. The theoretical contributions suggest that combining the research fields of emotions with privacy behaviour supports previous research as pride had a positive influence on the intention to share, whereas guilt adds unique insight for scholars. Further, the practical contributions imply that companies can benefit from inducing emotions in consumers' situations related to disclosing private information, but there are likewise pitfalls as emotions can be misused.