Neuroimaging insights into breaches of consumer privacy: Unveiling implicit brain mechanisms

Research has shown that consumers are concerned about corporations’ improper use of consumers’ information in the digital era. Complementing the literature with novel neuroimaging techniques can provide direct evidence of related implicit mental processes. This study uses privacy-related behavior adopted by corporations in the digital age to decipher brain mechanisms that underlie consumers’ reactions to breaches of privacy, thus providing implicit evidence that consumers perceive pain from such breaches. In Study 1, an online experiment used corporations’ behaviors to delve into underlying psychological mechanisms that shaped consumers’ responses to certain kinds of corporate use of private information. Our findings highlight the perceived harm resulting from privacy breaches and its effects on consumers’ intentions to take punitive action against companies that are responsible for such breaches. In Study 2, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to identify brain regions involved in these implicit responses. In the course of this study, we observed a correlation between consumers’ perception of harm from corporations’ improper use of private information and brain activation in regions of the amygdala and the temporoparietal junction. The inferior parietal lobule and the anterior cingulate cortex were also found to play roles in evaluating such behavior. By leveraging these novel neuroanatomical insights, our study explains consumers’ inclination to avoid harm in response to privacy breaches and their behavior in response to improper use of their information.