Vigilance and habituation: Polymorphic experience effects in internet users' privacy disclosure decisions

Internet users frequently encounter diverse data requests, and their privacy disclosure decisions have attracted massive practical and scholarly attention. Nevertheless, how the accumulation of users' disclosure-related experiences influences their future privacy disclosure decisions is still under-explored. In this paper, we theoretically derive and examine the impacts of two types of disclosure-related experiences—privacy disclosure and privacy invasion experiences. These experiences respectively represent user experiences in the participation and feedback stages of privacy disclosure events. We draw on the systematic-heuristic model of information processing and the privacy calculus model to raise the core speculation that users' disclosure-related experiences exert multiple forms of effects on their privacy disclosure decisions through multiple theoretical routes (i.e., polymorphic experience effects). To test this speculation, we conducted two online survey studies (N = 485, N = 324) and yielded three major findings: (1) users' privacy disclosure experiences can promote their information disclosure intentions through direct and mediation routes (i.e., habituation effects); (2) users' privacy invasion experiences can deter their information disclosure intentions through mediation and moderation routes, yet the latter varied across the investigated contexts (i.e., vigilance effects); (3) the moderating role of privacy disclosure experiences and the directly influencing role of privacy invasion experiences were largely insignificant. Our research reveals the polymorphic impacts of disclosure-related experiences on Internet users' privacy disclosure decisions and lays the foundation for future theoretical and practical work.