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To protect information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and resources against poor cyber hygiene behaviours, organisations commonly require internal users to confirm they will abide by an ICT Code of Conduct. Before commencing enrolment, university students sign ICT policies, however, individuals can ignore or act contrary to these policies. This study aims to evaluate whether students can apply ICT Codes of Conduct and explores viable approaches for ensuring that students understand how to act ethically and in accordance with such codes.

The authors designed a between-subjects experiment involving 260 students’ responses to five scenario-pairs that involve breach/non-breach of a university’s ICT policy following a priming intervention to heighten awareness of ICT policy or relevant ethical principles, with a control group receiving no priming.

This study found a significant difference in students’ responses to the breach versus non-breach cases, indicating their ability to apply the ICT Code of Conduct. Qualitative comments revealed the priming materials influenced their reasoning.

The authors’ priming interventions were inadequate for improving breach recognition compared to the control group. More nuanced and targeted priming interventions are suggested for future studies.

Appropriate application of ICT Code of Conduct can be measured by collecting student/employee responses to breach/non-breach scenario pairs based on the Code and embedded with ethical principles.

Shared awareness and protection of ICT resources.

Compliance with ICT Codes of Conduct by students is under-investigated. This study shows that code-based scenarios can measure understanding and suggest that targeted priming might offer a non-resource intensive training approach.

Cross-cultural research based on the means-end chain (MEC) theory tends to overestimate the stability of the dominant chains of a cultural group; at the same time, it pays insufficient attention to the influence of the context on an individual’s cultural anchorage. This study aims to adopt the dynamic constructivist approach to culture to show that, for the same product, differences in MEC for consumers from different cultures can be voluntarily reduced under certain conditions and to a certain extent.

The authors adopted an inter-subject experimental design: two cultures (French vs Korean) × three self-construal primings (independent vs interdependent vs control). Participants in the experimental group were randomly assigned to one of the three priming conditions. The no-priming control group made it possible to verify the effect of priming by measuring the difference in responses with respect to the two experimental groups.

The results highlight the effect of self-construal priming that contradicts the culture of origin. Cross-cultural independence and interdependence priming foster convergence between dominant chains of French and Korean participants by considerably reducing the cultural differences that are observed when there is no priming. It appears that a consumer’s cultural anchoring can be shaped by priming a specific dimension of self-construal, which, in turn, illustrates that cultural influence is a discontinuous process.

It is the first attempt to study variation in the dominant chains of a cultural group, rather than adopting the preconceived notion of their permanence or stability in different contexts. The methodological contribution is characterized by the combination of a method to record chains and a priming method applied in different cultural environments.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of priming on people’s risk perceptions and safety decisions in a virtual construction simulator.

Civil engineering students were recruited to interact with a virtual reality (VR) safety simulator. They were divided into four groups covering with and without sound and with and without priming factors. Data were collected on the risks that they perceived and the safety levels of their actions.

It was found that obvious stimuli in a virtual environment with sound help people to recognise more hazards near the location of the stimuli. Sound is helpful in training simulations to create high levels of presence. However, priming factors are not suitable to be added to VR simulators for training purposes. Priming of safe choice results in people taking fewer risks in the VR simulator, but this does not carry over into other situations. Compared to priming effects, being “injured” in a training simulator with sound improves trainees’ ability to make safe decisions.

VR simulation is helpful in construction training because of its unique ability to give trainees exposure to dangerous situations without physical risk. However, the overloading the working memory of users is detrimental to the outcomes. Therefore, the optimum level of complexity in VR simulators should be further studied.

The current study aims to examine couples' conjoint negotiation with a third party, testing the effects of asymmetrical contextual ambiguity, gender stereotypes' priming and egalitarianism. It predicted differences in the processes of decision making between egalitarian and traditional couples, reflected in choices of female or male negotiator.

Egalitarianism levels were measured by the Altrocchi and Crosby Marriage Questionnaire. The asymmetrical contextual ambiguity was manipulated through two newly constructed negotiation cases – one feminine‐stereotyped and the other masculine‐stereotyped, based on Miles and LaSalle. Priming of gender stereotypes was manipulated using two passages inducing explicit or implicit priming, based on Kray, Galinsky and Thompson. Primary statistical analysis was χ² test for equal proportions.

The hypotheses were by and large supported: as expected in all four experimental conditions, traditional couples chose men as their negotiator. By contrast, egalitarian couples tended to nominate their negotiator depending on the situation (feminine, masculine, and under implicit priming). In addition, under explicit priming their selection was in the predicted direction but not significant.

This study provides insights with respect to effective ways to conduct conjoint negotiations. In addition, it indicates the need to enhance women's negotiation self‐efficacy, so that they can become more active in negotiation processes.

The current study explored real‐life couples' conjoint negotiation with a third party, rather than examining couples' internal negotiation processes or individuals' dyadic negotiation, which prevailed in extant research. Future research should adopt the focus on genuine couples' conjoint negotiation, employed in this study.

Phishing attacks are the most common cyber threats targeted at users. Digital nudging in the form of framing and priming may reduce user susceptibility to phishing. This research focuses on two types of digital nudging, framing and priming, and examines the impact of framing and priming on users' behavior (i.e. action) in a cybersecurity setting. It draws on prospect theory, instance-based learning theory and dual-process theory to generate the research hypotheses.

A 3 × 2 experimental study was carried out to test the hypotheses. The experiment consisted of three levels for framing (i.e. no framing, negative framing and positive framing) and two levels for priming (i.e. with and without priming).

The findings suggest that priming users to information security risks reduces their risk-taking behavior, whereas positive and negative framing of information security messages regarding potential consequences of the available choices do not change users' behavior. The results also indicate that risk-averse cybersecurity behavior is associated with greater confidence with the action, greater perceived severity of cybersecurity risks, lower perceived susceptibility to cybersecurity risks resulting from the action and lower trust in the download link.

This research shows that digital nudging in the form of priming is an effective way to reduce users' exposure to cybersecurity risks.

Consumers seldom consider end-use consumption (reuse or upcycling) when products reach the end of their lifecycle. This study shows that end-use consumption can be encouraged if individuals are primed to think creatively, engage in end-use ideation (imagine end-use) and become inspired by more original ideas.

Three studies were carried out. Study 1 tested if creativity priming resulted in more effective end-use ideation (greater number of ideas and more original ideas) compared to environmental appeals and no intervention. Study 2 tested the effectiveness of creativity priming in a longitudinal setting. Study 3 demonstrated how creativity priming and end-use ideation could be practically executed using product packaging.

Creativity priming represents an effective intervention to stimulate end-use consumption with particularly positive results amongst less creative consumers. However, it was not the number of generated ideas, but their originality during end-use ideation that triggered inspiration.

This study demonstrates which interventions are more effective in changing consumer behaviour in favour of more sustainable practices.

Increasing environmental degradation requires consumers to change their behaviour by re-consuming products. This study shows that consumers can adopt end-use if they are primed to think creatively, imagine end-use consumption and generate more original ideas.

Creative thinking has been leveraged at product development stages, but not at the end of products’ lifecycle. This study integrated creativity priming, consumer imagination and inspiration theories to explain the underlying mechanism behind end-use consumption to scale up its adoption by consumers.

This study seeks to examine how consumers perceive a pharmaceutical company's advertisement through visual priming of the disclosure featured in the advertisement.

An online study with a convenience sample consisting of college students is used to examine the effects of a visually primed pharmaceutical advertising disclosure on attitude toward responsible advertising practice, trust toward the advertisement and attitude toward the advertisement.

The results reveal that consumers form better attitudes toward responsible advertising practice and higher levels of trust toward the advertisement when the disclosure is visually primed in the advertisement. However, visual priming of the disclosure may not enhance consumers' attitudes toward the advertisement. Further evidence indicates that allergy status, a motivation factor, has the main effect on attitude toward the advertisement. When consumers have allergies, they tend to form better attitudes toward the advertisement.

Despite the inherent limitations of this study that have to be confirmed in future research, this study suggests that visual priming of advertising disclosure may enhance consumers' attitudes toward advertising practice and trust toward the advertisement. However, consumers' attitudes toward the advertisement are enhanced directly by personal relevance to the advertisement instead of visual priming.

Based on the results of this study, the study provides a more realistic and socially responsible advertising disclosure practice for attracting consumer attention and processing toward pharmaceutical advertising.

This paper adds value to the existing literature on corporate social responsibility and promotes the effective management of socially responsible business through two main approaches: adopting visual priming of pharmaceutical advertising disclosure; and implementing more responsible pharmaceutical advertising practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine two forms of power construal – self-focused and other-focused power – on effects of increasing or decreasing sex-based harassment (SBH) tendencies through feeling states triggered by imagining these different types of power. In addition, dispositional traits associated with either self- and other-focused power were tested as moderators of these paths.

An online experiment was conducted with 549 US adults (58 percent men) who were randomly assigned to imagine themselves with self-focused power, other-focused power or control. Dispositional measures were completed before priming; and feelings of sexiness, powerfulness and communalism were completed after priming. Then, participants completed either modified versions of Pryor’s (1987) Likelihood to Sexually Harass Scale or Williams et al.’s (2017) Workplace Crush Scenario.

Moderated indirect effects indicated that self-focused power increased participants’ feelings of sexiness and powerfulness, which, in turn, increased either measure of SBH. However, these indirect effects were only significant for individuals low in Dark Triad traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy). Surprisingly, other-focused power priming indirectly increased SBH tendencies through communal feelings.

Moral licensing may explain the unexpected effect of other-focused power on SBH. Organizational leaders should monitor the damaging effects of both forms of power.

This is the first study to examine how both negative and positive power construals affect harassment tendencies and to document potential nefarious effects for both types of power.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of priming on consumer emotions and willingness to pay as consumers experience two services with two opposite valences.

A 2 (service experience sequence: failure–success, success–failure) × 3(priming: positive, negative, no priming) between-subject experiment was conducted with 230 college students in China.

Results indicate that when priming information is included, people give greater decision weight to the second service. Specifically, in the failure–success scenario, priming information between two services increases positive emotions and decreases negative emotions, raising willingness to pay. In the success–failure scenario, priming information decreases positive emotions and increases negative emotions, thus lowering willingness to pay.

First, if businesses discover the possibility of a service failure, then disclosing negative information is better than whitewashing the truth. Second, services following a campaign of positively framed messages should be carefully rendered. The damage of pre-failure positive priming is most certainly irreparable. Finally, in terms of communication, businesses and service providers should cater to consumers exposed to different levels of information accordingly.

Previous investigations focusing on a single purchase have argued that priming effects should cause consumers of varying tastes to react in a more unified manner to a service. This study extends the research scope to more realistic situations ”sequential service experiences with opposite valences” and asserts that differences in service experiences alter the influence of priming information.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to analyze whether musical priming induces greater recall of brands and, second, to study the emotional priming effects of music, in comparison with non-emotional music, including gender comparison.

Through the utilization of neuromarketing tools and protocols (quantitative and qualitative), the study explores facial eltromyography (EMG) capabilities and skin conductance responses (SCR) measuring consumers’ emotional responses.

The findings show that at least, 40 percent of the total sample recognized a musical priming effect. The study measures the emotional response to musical priming as positive. Emotional video recognition was much higher in females. Both the self-report and physiological measures support the notion that emotional background music can elicit emotional responses in consumers.

The research measured emotional response to musical priming without testing how these responses influence consumers’ attention and overall behavior.

The five senses, especially hearing, play an important role in the purchasing decision process and in the individual customer experience. People become aware of the products and brands that surround them and make their choice. In terms of digital trading activities and online sales, increasing physiological understanding of musical priming reactions may mean that, for companies, selling low-end online goods may be economically worthwhile to cooperate with platforms such as Spotify or iTunes to select individual users.

More research is needed in priming process techniques in order to better understand how primes activate knowledge in the consumer’s mind. Understanding this process will inform marketers how close a prime needs to be to a target to have an effective influence, as well as when marketers should be concerned about negative priming effects.

At the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that music priming is analyzed in terms of self-report and physiological measures From the measurement’s perspective, the results reaffirm that physiological and self-report measures capture different levels of information. While SCR and EMG capture real-time subconscious responses, MAN scale self-report data provide information regarding how cognitive effort, in terms of intensity and valence, affects brand recall.