Exploring How College Students’ Mental Models of Cybersecurity Threats Predict Cyber Knowledge and Hygiene

The role of human performance is critical in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity professionals and other employees must respond to unanticipated events successfully to maintain safety. Aviation safety has benefited from decades of human factors research to understand the role of threats and human error. Unfortunately, our present understanding of how to train people to respond effectively to cyber threats remains limited. The goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between threat understanding and engagement in behaviors that increase security, called cyber hygiene. Prior research suggested that an ability to recognize latent threats was associated with performance on a situational judgement test. In the current exploratory, descriptive study, the aim was to replicate that result in the domain of cybersecurity. The results of two studies suggest an association between cybersecurity knowledge and mental models of cyber hygiene but do not offer conclusions about the relationship between mental models and cyber hygiene behavior.