Understanding the Association of Update Characteristics, Trust, and Cognitive Dissonance with Intention to Update: A Study in the Context of Microsoft Windows

Prior efforts have identified different reasons such as perceived inconvenience due to task interruptions, past bad experiences associated with updating, and/or a perceived lack of importance for declining software updates. However, these do not fully explain why some users comply with update recommendations (i.e., update compliers) while others postpone them (i.e., update postponers). To investigate the factors contributing to this difference, we recruited 283 participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform and conducted a study using Microsoft Windows as the context. Our results suggest that update characteristics (e.g., restart required vs. not required, security vs. performance updates) are not correlated with users’ intentions to perform Windows updates or postpone them. Instead, we found that trust-based heuristics play a significant role in the update decision-making process. Notably, participants who indicated to update their systems exhibited a higher level of cognitive dissonance, indicating psychological discomfort associated with updating their systems. The paper discusses the implications of these findings and offers design recommendations to promote software update behavior while reducing cognitive dissonance.