Ah yes here we go, large scale study, 43% of participants gave away their password when bribed with a chocolate bar. People just don't realize how valuable passwords are.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160512085123.h...
Nearly 30% of people just gave out their password and didn't even know they were getting chocolate! They gave it away for literally nothing.
Some where given chocolate before and after , nowhere it says chocolate was offered as payment for sharing the password. Small gifts could have been inducement to establish relationship and trust not the same as a bribe as you characterises it
I find it hard to believe 25 /40 % plus people readily share their password to total strangers , without knowing more details it seems unrealistic
Social engineering is still a problem but am not sure bribes are the real concern . And to insinuate the cost of bribing is as low as candy for significant chunk of the population is just wrong
The premise that integrity of most people is bribed by few bars of candy was offensive to me I hope it is to you as well. The sensationalist headline basically claimed that, the abstract was a very different statement.
I am tired of studies that are constantly being cited these days: readers, journalists and even the principals invariably sensationalize the headlines.
It is a losing battle to get anyone to critically analyse information presented to them, sooner or later you are going to snap. Whether it is alternate medicine, creationism, or conspiracy theories there is a real damage out there everyday , few people ( Jon Stewart? ) are articulate despite being frustrated and are able to civil engage in discussion.
Even if the study actually claimed what the headline said, the bar to peer reviewed respected research in much of psychology and social sciences seems so low that just getting some correlation between two parameters is good enough. Raw data is rarely shared, and statistical methods used are superficially understood and discussed, half the analysis's are just putting data into a tool like SPSS with the whatever defaults IBM puts in these days. There is not much scope for replication of a finding, a core principle of the scientific method.