Social judgments and technological innovation: Adolescents' understanding of property, privacy, and electronic information

Two complementary studies were conducted to understand the diverse views adolescents hold regarding electronic information. One study examined concepts of property pertaining to copying computer programs. The second study examined concepts of privacy pertaining to accessing computer files. Preselection tasks were used with several hundred adolescents to assure a diversity of moral and nonmoral views toward electronic information. From this group, 64 adolescents (mean age, 17 years 2 months), 32 in each study, were selected for in-depth interviews, lasting approximately 2 hr. Results showed that adolescents who permitted copying computer programs (''computer pirating'') and accessing computer files (''computer hacking'') still held overall to property and privacy rights in general and applied those rights in prototypic situations (e.g., not stealing a bicycle and not reading another person's diary without permission). Several aspects of the technology contributed to adolescents' difficulty in identifying harmful or unjust consequences of computer-mediated actions. These aspects included the ways technology can easily reproduce software, distance the actor from potential victims, and allow for access without direct harm. The results also suggest that in response to a technological innovation whose conventional status ir in flux, adolescents appear to draw on foundational moral considerations to a larger extent than commonly recognized. Broadly understood, the research informs on the general phenomenon of cultural adaptation to technological innovation. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.