FOSTERING RESPONSIBLE ONLINE BEHAVIOR (PART I)

By Nancy Willard, Director of the Responsible Netizen Center for Advanced Technology in Education at the University of Oregon

To address the question of how to help young people use information and communication technologies in an ethical manner, we must consider how young people learn to engage in an ethical behavior. Furthermore, we must examine how information and communication technologies and the emerging cyber environment may impact their learning and behavior.

How Do Young People Learn To Engage In An Ethical Behavior?

As young people grow, their emerging cognitive development enables them to gain increasingly accurate perceptions of the world around them. Three principal external influences combine with this emerging cognitive development to affect moral development and behavior. These factors are:

Recognition That An Action Has Caused Harm

When a young person engages in inappropriate action and recognizes that his or her action has caused harm to another, this leads to an empathic response, which leads to feelings of remorse.

Social Disapproval

When a young person engages in inappropriate action and recognizes that others have become aware of and disapprove of this action, this leads to "loss of face" and feelings of shame.

Punishment By Authority

When a young person engages in an inappropriate action and this action is detected by a person with authority over the young person, this leads to punishment imposed by the person in authority, which can lead to feelings of regret, but also can lead to anger at the authority.

These three external influences not only affect behavior in both young people and older people, they also play a major role in a young person's moral development. During adolescence, young people develop a sense of their own personal identity. This personal identity incorporates an internalized personal moral code. In adolescents and adults, our personal moral code functions as an internal influence for ethical and responsible behavior. Behavior is influenced both by the external factors, as well as the internalized moral code.

When we perceive that we have violated our own personal moral code, we feel guilty -- unless we can rationalize our actions in some manner. We are all willing, under certain circumstances, to waiver from our personal moral code. We each have an internalized limit about how far we are willing to waiver from the ideal set forth in our personal moral code. This limit protects against unlimited transgressions. The boundaries of this limit vary according to each person.

There are a number of factors that appear to influence behavior that waivers from our personal moral code. We are more likely to waiver when our assessment is that:

• There is an extremely limited chance or no chance of detection and punishment.



• The transgression will not cause any perceptible harm.



• The harm may be perceptible, but is small in comparison with the personal benefit we will gain.



• The harm is to a large entity, such as a corporation, and no specific or known person will suffer any loss.



• Many other people engage in such behavior, even though others may consider the behavior illegal or unethical.



• The entity or individual that is -- or could be -- harmed by the action has engaged in unfair or unjust actions.

How Do Information And Communication Technologies Impact The Ethical Behavior Of Young People?

Information and communication technologies have a profound impact on the external influences of behavior.

Technology does not provide tangible feedback.

When people use technology, there is a lack of tangible feedback about the consequences of actions on others. People are distanced from a perception of the harm that their behavior has caused.

This lack of tangible feedback undermines the empathic response, and thus undermines feelings of remorse. The lack of tangible feedback makes it easier to rationalize an action.

Technology allows us to become invisible.

In fact, people are not totally invisible when they use the Internet. In most cases, they leave "cyberfootprints" wherever they go. But, despite this reality, the perception of invisibility persists. Some actions using technology are quite invisible, such as borrowing a friend's software program and installing it on your own computer. It is also possible to increase the level of invisibility with the use of technology tools. Establishing a pseudonymous account enhances invisibility. The fact that many people may be engaged in a similar activity also leads to a perception of invisibility because individual actions are such a "drop in the pond" that they are unlikely to be detected.

Invisibility undermines the potential impact of both authority and social disapproval. If a transgression cannot be detected and a person is unlikely to be punished, threats of punishment are not likely to have any impact whatsoever on behavior.

The issue of the impact of invisibility on human behavior is not new. Plato raised this very same issue in his story about the Ring of Gyges. In this story, a shepherd found a magical ring. When the ring's stone was turned to the inside, the shepherd became invisible. Thus questions were raised: How will we choose to behave if we are invisible? Will we do whatever we want to do because we know that nobody can catch and punish us? Will we do something that could hurt someone because we know that nobody can tell who did this? Or will we do what we know is right?

It is important to recognize that young people are using the Internet, and thus are influenced by the lack of tangible feedback and perceptions of invisibility, at the same time that they are in the process of developing their internalized personal moral code. We do not know how this will affect their development and internalization process.

Check back next month to learn strategies that can be used to address the lack of tangible feedback and perception of invisibility when young people use information technologies.

Excerpted from introductory materials for Computer Ethics, Etiquette, and Safety for 21st Century Students, by Nancy Willard, to be published by the International Society for Technology in Education, Fall 2001.