The intention-behaviour gap in cybersecurity

More and more we see cybersecurity professionals using surveys about attitudes and intention as performance indicators of their interventions. While questions like “Do you think it is important to use complex passwords” might give an insight on someone’s attitude toward password complexity, they are not good indicators of our human-risks. Values, Attitudes, Intentions and Behaviours are sometimes confusing concepts for some people. Here is a quick summary of the differences between values, attitudes, intentions and behaviours and what we should do to reduce the gap.