Influence of Risk/Safety Information Framing on Android App-Installation Decisions

Abstract

We conducted three experiments with participants recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to examine the influence on app-installation decisions of summary risk information derived from the app permissions. This information can be framed negatively as amount of risk or positively as amount of safety, which was varied in all the experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, the participants performed tasks in which they selected two Android apps from a list of six; in Experiment 3, the tasks were to reject two apps from the list. This summary information influenced the participants to choose less risky alternatives, particularly when it was framed in terms of safety and the app had high user ratings. Participants in the safety condition reported that they attended more to the summary score than did those in the risk condition. They also showed better comprehension of what the score was conveying, regardless of whether the task was to select or reject. The results imply that development of a valid risk/safety index for apps has the potential to improve users’ app-installation decisions, especially if that information is framed as amount of safety.