A Survey on the Geographic Diversity of Usable Privacy and Security Research

In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI), psychology, and behavioral sciences, researchers have been concerned that participant samples are skewed toward WEIRD, i.e., participants mostly come from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. This WEIRD skew may affect the generalizability of study results and hinder understanding of diverse participant populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields such as HCI. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were WEIRD and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct a user study locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. We provide the following suggestions to improve geographic diversity: facilitate replication studies, improve reproducibility, address issues of study and recruiting methods, diversify researchers, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations.