Leveraging Protection Motivation Theory to support secure online behaviours: Two experimental studies with vulnerable age groups

Abstract

Cyber security represents a growing societal challenge, with different population groups facing distinct vulnerabilities while often receiving little actionable guidance from public authorities and media outlets. This study investigates Protection Motivation Theory (PMT)-informed risk communication in two target-group-specific cyber security contexts. In two preregistered randomised posttest-only experiments, we tested PMT-based messages in different media formats, text versus video, among adolescents and young adults aged 14 to 21 years (N = 1193) and older adults aged 60 to 75 years (N = 1085). Each experiment introduced a target-group-specific threat scenario and tested different variants of PMT-based risk messages. The studies assessed post-treatment behavioural intention and experiment-specific in-survey link-click behavioural proxies. In Experiment 1, no statistically significant differences in post-treatment behavioural intention were detected across the message conditions. Individual post-treatment perceptions of coping-appraisal elements were associated with intention in supplementary exploratory analyses. In Experiment 2, participants in several PMT-based message conditions reported higher post-treatment behavioural intention than participants in the neutral condition. However, coping-enhanced messages and messages emphasising individual coping components did not significantly outperform threat-only communication. Neither experiment showed statistically significant message-condition differences in its respective in-survey link-click behavioural proxy. The primary format comparisons also provided no statistically significant evidence that text and video differed in their effects on post-treatment intention. The experiments produced different context-specific patterns. The findings therefore support cautious conclusions about post-treatment protective intention within the examined contexts but do not demonstrate isolated effects of individual PMT components or actual cyber security behaviour change.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 2026 · DOI ↗