Susceptibility to Email Fraud: A Review of Psychological Perspectives, Data-Collection Methods, and Ethical Considerations

Abstract

The authors review the existing literature on the psychology of email fraud, and attempt to integrate the small but burgeoning set of research findings. They show that research has adopted a variety of methodologies and taken a number of conceptual positions in the attempt to throw light on decisions about emails that may be in best-case scenarios, sub-optimal, or in the worst-case scenarios, catastrophic. They point to the potential from cognitive science and social psychology to inform the field, and attempt to identify the opportunities and limitations from researcher's design decisions. The study of email decision-making is an important topic in its own right, but also has the potential to inform about general cognitive processes too.