From Familiarity to Vulnerability: The Role of Social Distance and Information Processing in Spear Phishing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As technology advances, spear phishing has emerged as a major threat to online users' information and financial security. Unlike traditional phishing attacks, spear phishing is a more sophisticated form of cyber deception in which scammers impersonate familiar or trusted entities to manipulate recipients into clicking malicious links or opening malware-laden attachments. Prior research has established that familiarity with an information source can increase an individual's susceptibility to phishing attacks. Social distance, as a theoretical construct that encapsulates familiarity, provides a more structured framework for understanding its impact. While information processing theory has been widely used to examine phishing vulnerability, the role of social distance in shaping information processing pathways and influencing phishing susceptibility remains unexplored. To address this gap, this study employs a survey-based approach to investigate the impact of social distance on individuals' information processing routes and their susceptibility to phishing attacks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".