![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/files\/2017\/10\/leonie.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Leonie Schittenhelm<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Forgotten your password yet again? Jamming the keys harder and harder with every try even though you have tried this one three times already? Only to finally (your keyboard breathes a sigh of relief) give in and request a new password. If you have been there, don\u2019t worry \u2013 it might just be how tired you were last Thursday.<\/p>\n
Researchers at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University are interested in finding out how a user\u2019s personality traits and other factors influence how they choose passwords as well as the likelihood of successfully remembering them. To do this they asked 100 non-computer science students to create a password, which they had to recall to access a login one week later. The catch? Half of the students had to complete a cognitively exhausting task immediately before thinking up a password. The results were clear: the more mentally exhausted a participant was at time of password creation, the less likely they were to remember it the following week.<\/p>\n
But the study, cheekily called \u2018Why Johnny Cannot Remember His Password \u2013 An Empirical Investigation\u2019, didn\u2019t stop there. They also tested participants for common personally traits, and assessed password strength as well as if this particular password had been used by the student in another context before. Interestingly people who scored high in terms of agreeableness \u2013 a personal trait associated with kindness towards other people and compliance with rules \u2013 were the most likely to choose a completely new password. This could suggest that the nagging e-mails about cyber security do work, but possibly only on the people already receptive to these kinds of messages.\u00a0 Male participants were four times more likely to choose a completely new password, but this came at the cost of remembering it the following week, which was only at about 50%. Another surprise? There does not actually seem to be very much difference between the difficulty to remember a weak or a strong password.<\/p>\n
So when you choose your next password, remember to do it when well-rested and don\u2019t be afraid to choose something quite long. I personally might keep a little note of it in a safe place \u2013 at least until the following week\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Leonie Schittenhelm Forgotten your password yet again? Jamming the keys harder and harder with every try even though you have tried this one three times already? Only to finally (your keyboard breathes a sigh of relief) give in and request a new password. If you have been there, don\u2019t worry \u2013 it might just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7176,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-leonie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":472,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}