Cybersecurity education often frames end users as the weakest link, prompting professionals to prefer technical countermeasures over human factors. Yet research shows that sustainable protection depends on perceptions, heuristics, and cognitive load. Even strong security cultures experience lapses triggered by inattention or biased judgment. This paper argues that cybersecurity faculty should explicitly teach students these psychological dynamics, reframing users as decision-makers with bounded cognitive capacity rather than security liabilities. Studies show secure behavior is shaped less by stable traits and more by contextual, cognitive, and state-dependent factors. Cognitive and cultural biases such as optimism bias and affect heuristics distort employees’ risk assessments before policy cues are even considered (Tsohou et al., 2015), while distraction and time pressure significantly reduce phishing detection accuracy, with 31% of participants clicking malicious links under realistic conditions (Musuva et al., 2021). Habit strength, response efficacy, and responsibility outperform threat awareness in predicting security intentions (Tsai et al., 2016), and situational support such as access to help and training has been shown to bolster self-efficacy and foster protective habits (Hong & Furnell, 2021). Executive function skills, including impulse control and sustained attention, appear critical, as higher elaboration improves detection only when distractions are low (Musuva et al., 2021). Time pressure reduces cognitive bandwidth and increases reliance on heuristics, leading even knowledgeable users to make risky decisions (Chowdhury et al., 2020). Viewing time, not traits like impulsivity, better predicts phishing detection (Rajagulasingam & Taylor, 2021), further supporting the claim that behavior is fluid and modulated by mental state. Yet such variability is rarely reflected in curricula, which still emphasize rational models and overlook end-user realities. As Dawson and Thomson (2018) argue, effective cyber professionals need not only technical expertise but also social intelligence, adaptability, and a values-driven orientation.

This review identifies four topic clusters to help faculty reorient cybersecurity education toward a human-centered approach. These include:
(1) the role of cognitive heuristics and biases in shaping security judgments and policy adherence;
(2) state-dependent behavior variability driven by stress, fatigue, and cognitive overload;
(3) the moderating role of executive function and attentional control in determining security outcomes under real-world constraints; and
(4) the influence of situational support, motivational dynamics, and organizational values on cybersecurity behavior and workforce development.

Reviewing these factors equips faculty with evidence-based building blocks for course design. By clustering current research gaps and methodological challenges, the review provides a roadmap for collaborative scholarship (e.g., psychology–computer science joint seminars, mixed-methods meta-analyses) and for grant proposals aimed at developing teaching resources. Unless cognitive biases, motivation, and individual differences become foundational knowledge, tomorrow’s cybersecurity workforce will perpetuate the fallacy that more technology alone equals more security. The synthesis invites educators to teach that humans are not weakest links but adaptive allies essential to sustainable defense.

Keywords: Cybersecurity education, Human-Centered Cybersecurity, Security behavior, Security decision-making.