Personality Types, Passwords, and Cybersecurity Nudges

The goal of this research was to determine if there was any link between personality types and password usage. The SONA system and the Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to recruit users to participate in the research study. Each user’s personality was obtained through a survey. The survey asked users to enter a strong password. Passwords were scored from zero to four with zero being classified as “too guessable” and four being classified as “very unguessable.” A second aspect of this research was to determine if a targeted message, based on the personality, had an effect on password behavior.