People with higher job status may be more willing to sacrifice their privacy for security reasons, according to a recent study.

Researchers from Penn State University found that people in leadership positions who are preoccupied with security may shape policy and decision-making in areas ranging from terrorism to investing, and perhaps cloud other options.

"What may get lost in the decision-making process is that one can enhance security without the negative impact on privacy," Jens Grossklags, researcher and assistant professor of information sciences and technology, said in a statement. "It's more of a balance, not a tradeoff, to establish good practices and sensible rules on security without negatively impacting privacy."

For the study, researcher conducted two experiments that examined how people with high-status job assignments evaluated security and privacy and how impulsive or patient they were in making decisions.

In the first experiment, the research team randomly assigned 146 participants roles as either a supervisor or a worker to determine how those assignments changed the way leaders approached security or privacy during a task.

They found that People who were appointed supervisors showed a significant increase in their concern for security. The researchers also found that participants who were assigned a worker-level status expressed higher concern for privacy, but not significantly higher.

Another experiment, made up of 120 participants, examined whether patience was correlated with high-status assignments. The researchers asked the participants how long they would delay accepting a prize from a bank if the size of that prize would increase over time.

For example, the participants were asked how much money they would need to receive immediately to make them indifferent to receiving $80 in two months. As in the previous experiment, the researchers divided the group into high-status supervisors and low-status workers.

The low-status workers were more impulsive -- they were willing to sacrifice 35 percent more to receive the prize money now rather than later. The supervisors, on the other hand, were more willing to wait, a sign that they would be more patient in making decisions with long-term consequences such as privacy and security. The Experimental Social Science Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley supported this work.

The findings were recently presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Amsterdam, Netherlands.