Evolutionary Insights into Digital Ecologies of Fear
The internet is a virtual social environment, where it can be difficult to discern genuine threats. The goal of this research is to develop new insights into parents’ perceptions of online risks to their children. The project focuses on the parents of children in middle childhood, ages 6-12. The main goal is to gain insights that will inform the development of digital environments that more accurately align online dangers and parental fears. To address this alignment, this project brings together experts in evolutionary anthropology, computer science, and digital experience design in a novel interdisciplinary collaboration. The project will shed light on a theoretical framing, the digital ecology of fear. The project will advance a burgeoning new area of research and design that can impact cybersecurity for families.
The project will pursue the following three objectives: (1) develop method and theory to build basic behavioral knowledge that can inform new designs for digital ecologies that more accurately align risk and fear, (2) identify design guidelines, taking into consideration the effects of the digital ecology of fear, and (3), enrich the collaboration between computer science and anthropology by cross-training graduate students in relevant methods and concepts from both disciplines. Ecologies are influenced by several factors: environmental context, threats, risk perception, adaptive response, costs, and benefits. This project is identifying the ecological factors that influence the digital ecologies of fear using established research techniques and investigating new techniques to reveal the ecological, social, and individual factors activating fear of the digital-real world continuum. The project’s mapping of the digital ecology of fear will identify guidelines that consider and ameliorate the effects of those factors.