The Morality Behind Supporting Crowdfunding Campaigns for Eco-Hacktivists

ABSTRACT

Hacktivism, the use of cyber-attacks for a social or political agenda, is becoming increasingly more common. We wanted to investigate if specific aspects of morality and subjective support for nonviolent eco-hacktivism would predict a willingness to donate to a crowdfunding campaign. A total of 350 participants responded to our cross-sectional study. To ensure the dimensionality of our morality components, we ran three principal component analyses (one for each actor in the hacktivism vignette) prior to running our regression model. Our regression model explained 41% of the variance in the willingness to donate to a crowdfunding campaign for the hacktivists. In addition to being younger, there was one significant predictor for each actor in our model. Perceiving the hackers to have higher moral-altruistic beliefs, feeling more moral-social connectivity to the spokesperson, and having more moral behavioral intention with the social media commentator were significant predictors. Preexisting beliefs toward clean water mediated the relationships between moral-altruistic beliefs of the hackers and moral-social connectivity to the spokesperson and a willingness to donate to the crowdfunding campaign. These findings suggest that different perceived morality toward varying actors may better predict support for hacktivism than others, and preexisting beliefs may assist in suppressing objective morality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

¹ There are other theoretical frameworks that could also explicate support for prosocial unethical behavior, such as Sykes and Matza’s (1957) neutralization theory, whereby there are “neutralizations,” such as euphemisms, individuals use to assuage their guilt of or justify partaking in antisocial behavior.

² Three were removed for being multivariate outliers; six for reading the article too quickly, and two for being under the age of legal consent.

³ Ambiguous loadings were removed when an item had loadings on two or more components with less than .10 difference.

⁴ Gender was not included as it was not significantly correlated to the DV, and analysis revealed it acted as a suppressor variable in the model.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Hardiman Scholarship at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Notes on contributors

Christie Tetreault

Christie Tetreault received her PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway (now University of Galway). She is currently a post-doctoral fellow with the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science and Justice Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focusses on how group dynamics, cognitive shifts, and dispositions influence susceptibility and resilience to various forms of extremism and interpersonal violence.

Kiran M. Sarma

Kiran Sarma is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Galway (formerly National University of Ireland, Galway), a chartered forensic psychologist and Chair of the Division of Forensic Psychology of the Psychological Society of Ireland.