Personality, culture and password behavior: a relationship study

Abstract

Culture - an aggregation of people's location, language, tribe and economic activities might have a role to play in the security decisions of users. Culture in this context is even more relevant in most African societies as there are many ethnic groups. Studies on users' password behavior have seen some advances, but little is known of the relationship between people's password behaviors, their personality and cultural backgrounds. In this paper, we report a study of the relationship between passwords and personality of the users. We also analyzed culture (via ethnic grouping) to determine its relationship with password strength. The results of the study of 230 participants indicate that although there exists a relationship between personality of users and their passwords behavior, it is quite weak and mainly negatively related except for participants high in agreeableness (cooperative) traits, hence might create stronger passwords. In addition, most participants (93%) created weak passwords, notwithstanding, participants who have defined themselves as belonging to Hausa tend to create better passwords than Nupe and Gbagyi ethnic group participants.