Abstract
Alarms, alerts, and other binary cues affect user behavior in complex ways. One relevant distinction is the suggestion that there are two different responses to alerts – compliance (the tendency to perform an action cued by the alert) and reliance (the tendency to refrain from actions as long as no alert is issued). An experiment tested the dependence of the two behaviors on the Positive and Negative Predictive Values of the alerts (PPV and NPV) to determine whether these are indeed two different behaviors. Results suggest that the compliance is relatively stable and unaffected by irrelevant information (the NPV), while reliance is also affected by the PPV. The results are discussed in terms of multiple-process theories of trust in information sources.
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