Cyberdeviant behaviour is an umbrella term referring to online behaviour that contradicts legal or social norms. It encompasses diverse behaviours as hacking, piracy, and cyberbullying, among others. Most existing research into social psychological processes underlying cyberdeviance cannot capture the nuances of different cyberdeviant behaviours, the norms and social judgments that lead to their being labelled “deviant”, and the pathways leading into and out of them. To tackle this problem, we conducted five studies to (1) identify the dimensions of cyberdeviant behaviours, (2) develop and test a typology based on these dimensions, (3) investigate the trajectories of engaging in these behaviours, (4) examine the prognostic value of risk factors for the ascertained trajectorial groups and (5) investigate the normative malleability of cyberdeviance. In Study one, we found seven key dimensions characterising cyberdeviance, namely offender motivation, target selection, target scope, societal agreement of violated norm, immediacy of harm, attack scope, and direction of the aggression. In Study two, we identified three different clusters of cyberdeviant behaviours based on different salience of these dimensions: interpersonal, data-oriented, and non-prototypical. In Study three, we conducted secondary data analysis of longitudinal panel data to identify growth curves for engagement in interpersonal cyberdeviance (cyberviolence), and non-prototypical cyberdeviance (piracy). While engagement in interpersonal cyberdeviance was significantly predicted by psychosocial risk factors, we found this not to be the case for non-prototypical cyberdeviance. In Study four, we interviewed former hackers to investigate pathways into and out of hacking as an example of data-oriented cyberdeviance. Among our participants, we found a strong gamification of hacking activities that individuals ceased to engage in with increasing social bonds and decreasing perceptions of hacking as play. Based on these previous findings, we examined the normative malleability of hacking in gamers in Study five. Whereas participants judged four hacking scenarios differently in relation to injunctive norms, we observed no differences for descriptive norms. Consequently, we argue that because of the differences in the underlying dimensions of these three different kinds of online behaviours, different psychological processes drive both engagement in these behaviours and how others evaluate the normativity of those behaviours.
Exploring pathways to deviant and conformist behaviour in cyberspace
Machande, A. D. (Author). 26 Jun 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › PhD