Cyber Alliance Series: "Privacy and Disclosure in the Digital Age"

Why do people post salacious photos or incendiary comments on social media, when the damage to their relationships, reputation and careers could be permanent? Why do we prefer to hire people who reveal unsavory information about themselves over those who choose not to? Why did Target face consumer ire for sending pregnancy-related coupons to a teenage customer it (correctly) inferred to be pregnant? Yet, how come Amazon can make product recommendations conspicuously based on users’ behavior without seemingly provoking backlash? These questions are manifestations of the privacy paradox: the apparent disconnect between people’s privacy preferences and behavior. This Cyber Alliance talk with Harvard Business School Associate Prof. Leslie John will describe recent research investigating answers to these questions, with a particular focus on a paper exploring the effect of temporary sharing on impression formation. About the Speaker Leslie K. John is a Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Currently, she teaches on the topics of Negotiation, Marketing and Behavioral Economics in various Executive Education courses, including in the Program for Leadership Development. She has also taught extensively in both the required and elective MBA curricula. Professor John is a behavioral scientist who studies how people make decisions, and the wisdom or error of those decisions. In her primary line of research, Dr. John studies privacy decision-making, identifying what drives people to share or withhold personal information, as well as their reactions to firms’ and employers’ use of their personal data. In another line of research, Dr. John studies health decision-making, devising psychologically-informed interventions to help people make healthier choices. Her work has been published in leading academic journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Management Science, The Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. It has received media coverage in outlets including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Time Magazine. She has received numerous awards, including from the Association for Psychological Science and the Marketing Science Institute; and was named a Wired Innovation Fellow. Professor John holds a Ph.D. in behavioral decision research from Carnegie Mellon University, where she also earned a M.Sc. in psychology and behavioral decision research. She completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Waterloo.