earticle

영어

With growing concerns about digital privacy, understanding the mechanisms that motivate or hinder privacy-protective behavior has become increasingly critical yet challenging. While Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) traditionally emphasizes motivational determinants, this study highlights the often-overlooked role of habitual resistance. Drawing upon PMT, we propose a dual-pathway model that simultaneously examines factors that both encourage and disrupt privacy-protective behavior. Our proposed extended PMT model was empirically tested via an online survey targeting Korean internet users, yielding 309 valid responses. We used SPSS 29.0.2.0 to obtain descriptive statistics and SmartPLS 4.1.0.3 to estimate the structural equation model. Findings revealed that both perceived threats and perceived efficacy significantly enhanced motivation, which in turn strongly predicted privacy-protective behavior. However, maladaptive habits negatively affected protective behavior, even when motivation was strong. Interestingly, perceived efficacy did not significantly reduce maladaptive habits, indicating that motivation alone was insufficient to change established behavior patterns. Our study advances online information privacy research by synthesizing motivational drivers and habitual barriers within a unified framework. The findings call for more comprehensive interventions that address often underestimated automatic behavioral tendencies. This study also offers insights for designing privacy education and policy tools that target unintentional barriers to protective action.