Uncovering the role of optimism bias in social media phishing: an empirical study on TikTok

Driven by the rapid growth and prevalent use of social media, social media phishing has become an increasingly serious threat due to its wide-ranging disruptive potential. Researchers believe that optimism bias – where one tends to judge his or her own chance of experiencing a negative event to be lower than that of others – can partly explain the discrepancies between one’s knowledge about threats and the actual behaviours taken to mitigate such threats. Therefore, the current study sought to explore social media phishing from the perspective of optimism bias. More specifically, we focused on a demonstration of optimism bias regarding being phished on social media, what leads to this bias, and the extent to which it ultimately influences users’ intention to take preventive measures against social media phishing. The results showed that individuals displayed optimism bias of being phished on TikTok, that perceived controllability over phishing on TikTok increased optimism bias, and that TikTok addiction reduced optimism bias. While optimism bias had no effect on the intention to take preventive measures against social media phishing on TikTok, information security awareness exerted a positive effect on this intention.