Human Factors in Cyber Security: Behavioral Economics of Trust and Phishing Susceptibility

Abstract

Abstract: Technical controls alone do not fill the trust gap exploited by social engineering campaigns; attacker success hinges on predictable human heuristics. This study applies behavioral economics constructs—loss aversion, temporal discounting, and social proof—to dissect why users override warning banners and surrender credentials. We conducted a yearlong field experiment with 6,000?employees across four industries, seeding emails that systematically varied cognitive cues and urgency framing. Eye tracking and click stream analytics showed that scarcity language combined with brand mimicry elevated click through rates by 62?%. Conversely, nudges leveraging anticipated regret—“You could lose access if you act hastily”—reduced compromise by 38?% without inducing alert fatigue. We propose an adaptive training regimen that gamifies these insights, shifting from compliance lectures to reinforcement learning style micro interventions.

Keywords: Human?Factors; Phishing; Behavioral?Economics; Trust?Calibration; Cyber?Awareness.