How Psychological Factors Can be Leveraged to Enhance Gamified Security Awareness Training?

Abstract

Researchers’ interest in gamified security awareness training has risen throughout the last decade, particularly due to the gamification’s influence on increasing engagement, participant and learning retention compared to traditional training methods. The effectiveness of all training courses is highly tied to psychology, as it is the underlying factor that influences a learners ambitions to learn and benefit from a training course. In gamification, psychology is often introduced through a verity of gaming elements such as leaderboards, badges, and point systems which when incorporated at an optimal level can induce several psychological feelings such as social pressure, and satisfaction. When these feelings are induced within a training course, they can highly affect the way a training is perceived by learners, making them more or less motivated to engage and participate in learning activities.

This study was conducted with the primary goal of assessing the psychological effects imposed by time pressure, feedback, novelty, and socially connected elements within a gamified security awareness training to provide recommendations on ways to optimally implement them in future courses. In order to achieve this goal, a comprehensive analysis was performed on three publicly available datasets that were related to experiments on the application of gamification in multiple contexts. Finally, this study was successful in accomplishing its primary goal, and addressing identified literature gaps in the field by deriving valuable insights on engagement levels raised through the conjunction of leaderboards and feedback, the effects of time constraints on decision making, and the impact of novelty on continuity