Group closeness effects on co-owned information sharing: A multilevel perspective

Co-owned information contains personal details about multiple individuals, often nested within a social group. It is important to study the sharing of such information because its careless disclosure can violate the privacy of all co-owners. What makes such sharing decisions unique is that they are often conducted within a tight social context, the attributes of which can systematically affect the decisions of all individuals nested within the group. This necessitates multi-level theorizing and testing. Doing so, we theorize the impact of group closeness (a group-level attribute) on co-owned information sharing by the group members (individual-level reflections and behaviors). We tested our ideas through a deceptive procedure: ninety participants in 40 groups were asked to voluntarily share a co-owned photo of 2–3 group members, for algorithm training purposes (cover story). Hierarchical Linear Modeling revealed (1) the retained relevance of self-centered private information sharing motivators and deterrents in group contexts, and (2) a cross-level effect of group closeness: it weakened the negative effect of privacy concerns on actual co-owned information sharing. The findings underscore the role of social context in determining the potency of privacy concerns to drive the privacy behaviors of individuals nested within this context.