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Dissertation Information for Batya Friedman

NAME:
- Batya Friedman

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Education

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Berkeley (USA) (1988)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected

Title: Social judgments and technological innovation: Adolescents' conceptions of computer piracy and privacy

Abstract: "This study aimed to provide a characterization of adolescents' social judgments about property and privacy, particularly in relation to innovations that have occurred through computer technology. Sixty-four eleventh and twelfth grade students were interviewed, half on property and half on privacy. The property interview entailed five situations: three involved computer property (copying purchased commercial software to use personally, to give, and to sell), one prototypic property (taking a bicycle), and one potentially ambiguous non-computer intellectual property (taping a purchased record album to give to another). The privacy interview also entailed five situations: three involved computer privacy (accessing another's computer file and not reading the information, reading the information, and changing the information), one prototypic privacy (reading another's diary), and one potentially ambiguous non-computer privacy (reading a letter lying open on someone's desk).

Property results showed that copying commercial software in all three situations was often accepted by students who otherwise negatively evaluated the prototypic property violation. This major difference could often be attributed to differing understandings of software as private property and assessments of the consequences of copying software for others. The privacy results showed that most students judged as wrong computer and prototypic privacy acts, and provided welfare, rights, and fairness reasons for their evaluations. Thus, unlike for property, the privacy results suggested that students have largely assimilated electronic information to their existing conceptions of prototypic private information. The one exception was for the situation of accessing another's computer file without reading the information (computer hacking); some students perceived neither harmful consequences nor injustice, and, as such, judged the act as permissible. For both property and privacy rights, students' understandings were often characterized as comprising an overarching moral component that for particular instantiations of the rights could be informed by convention. These results are discussed as they bear on a domain-specific theory of social cognition and on the issue of social judgments in the context of a culture's adaptation to technological innovation."

MPACT Scores for Batya Friedman

A = 2
C = 0
A+C = 2
T = 2
G = 1
W = 2
TD = 2
TA = 0
calculated 2010-09-28 01:03:43

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