Phishing, a prevalent cyber threat leveraging social engineering, poses significant challenges in the digital landscape. Despite advancements in security technologies, phishing continues to exploit human vulnerabilities, underscoring the need to understand how individuals detect such attacks. Existing research often assumes phishing detection occurs in isolation, overlooking real-world multitasking contexts where competing cognitive demands can hinder detection. This study fills this gap by examining phishing detection in the multitasking context and theorizing the relevant cognitive mechanisms and phishing-specific factors that influence phishing detection performance. Drawing on the memory-for-goals theory, we investigate the effects of working memory load (WML) from the primary task, goal activation (GA) towards phishing detection on performance, and message framing of phishing attacks. Findings from two online experiments reveal that increased WML impairs detection accuracy, while GA improves performance and reduces the negative impact of WML; furthermore, GA plays a more significant role in gain-framed phishing emails compared to loss-framed ones. Our research shifts the focus from message characteristics to the influence of multitasking on phishing detection. The results highlight the need for context-aware interventions that better align with real-world user behaviour, which provides a foundation for designing more effective phishing defences in multitasking digital environments.

This study investigates the synergistic impacts of online and offline social participation on older adults’ subjective well-being outcomes. By drawing on the socio-emotional selectivity perspective, we conduct a cohort analysis using the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Ageing data and find that while online participation alone may increase loneliness, engaging in offline participation will make online participation beneficial. Loneliness serves as a mediating mechanism such that engaging in both online and offline social participation can indirectly enhance satisfaction with life by reducing loneliness. We further find a significant moderating effect of social support, which mitigates the negative impact of loneliness on life satisfaction.