People Are More Positive About Hacking When They Feel They ’ve Been Treated Unfairly

By Emily Reynolds

Type the word “hacker” into any stock photo search engine and you’ll be greeted with pages and pages of images of someone sitting in the dark, typing threateningly at their laptop, and more often than not wearing a balaclava or Guy Fawkes mask. That Matrix-inspired 1990s aesthetic of green code on black is still prevalent — and still implies that hackers have inherently nefarious ends.

More recently, however, the idea of hacking as a prosocial activity has gained more attention. Earlier this year, one group of hackers made headlines for donating $10,000 in Bitcoin to two charities, the result of what they say was the extortion of millions of dollars from multinational companies.

While the charities declined the donations, social media responses were more mixed, with some praising the hackers. And in a new study, Maria S. Heering and colleagues from the University of Kent argue that our view of hacking is somewhat malleable: when people were treated unfairly and the institutions responsible did nothing to redress their grievances, they felt more positive about hackers who targeted the source of their anger.

In the first study, 259 participants were asked to imagine themselves taking an exam which was crucial to their future career prospects. The questions in the exam, they were told, were vague and unrelated to the content they’d been taught — and when looking at the transcript after the exam, they found they had been ...

Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - November 19, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Anger Morality Technology Source Type: blogs