Developers, your security warnings are messing with people’s brains, and not in a good way.
In fact, given the poor timing of security warnings popping up, most people – we’re talking about up to 87% in some cases – ignore them.
Ignore, as in, researchers have found that scarcely any brain activity shows up when they measured test subjects via
FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) as security warnings interrupted those subjects while they were trying to do other things, such as input their login or enter a validation code.
The conclusion comes from
a paper published in an Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) journal on Thursday by researchers from Brigham Young University in Utah and the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
The problem, more or less, is one of systems fatigue, the researchers said. As it is, “System-generated alerts are ubiquitous in personal computing,” as well as in our proliferating mobile devices.
