silencing
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Imagine this scenario: Your department is hiring a new manager. Many of your senior colleagues like candidate Jonny and are planning to vote for him. You, based on your own observations, believe that Jonny is unfit and incompetent for this position. How likely are you going to cast a negative vote if your department has 1) an open ballot system – everyone knows your choice, or 2) a secret ballot system – your choice remains confidential?
A common sense guess would be that you are less likely to vote according to your opinion or conscience in the situation of an open ballot than a secret one: Voting against those with greater power than you may have negative ramifications for your career and relationships. And if Jonny indeed becomes your boss, you probably will have to live in wariness from then on. Doing the right thing despite potential threats to one’s own well-being requires moral courage. Anonymity in a secret ballot may facilitate that.
Anonymity and moral courage in cyberspace
We conducted a series of experiments to examine how anonymity influences moral courage in the context of social media where much social activism takes place nowadays. First, in a correlational study, we found that participants who perceived greater anonymity on the social media platform they used also reported greater moral courage to engage in prosocial behaviors on the platform (e.g., “I actively take part in action that tries to influence moral issues by, for example, signing petitions and appeals on the internet.”). This was independent of demographical factors such as gender, age, and education.
anonymity
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Next, we manipulated perceived social media anonymity and measured subsequent moral courage. Participants were divided into two groups, reading a text depicting a person using an anonymous or a non-anonymous social media App called Linster. The former group who was led to believe that Linster would ensure anonymity reported greater moral courage to perform various activities on the App (e.g., “I will post on this platform against social injustice, such as gender inequality or unreasonable dismissal of employees.”), when compared with the latter group who was led to believe that their identities would be made known to others. Anonymity on social media thus enhances moral courage.
One possible reason for why anonymity on social media enhances moral courage is that it may reduce the perceived risk or potential for adverse consequences to oneself. Indeed, we found in a subsequent experiment that when participants were ensured anonymity on a social media platform, they perceived lower personal risk for engaging in actions of moral courage like the one below. In turn, these participants also expressed a greater inclination to engage in such actions, when compared with a second group of participants who were led to believe that their identities would be public on the platform.
You see a posting from a job seeker asking about the working culture of your company. You know that the company always requires employees to work overtime and withholds overtime pay, and that many of your co-workers suffer from health issues due to continuous overtime. How likely are you to reply to this posting and inform the job seeker of the real culture of your company?
There are also interesting individual differences in how likely people exercise moral courage online, with or without anonymity. People differ in the extent to which they derive meaning from their moral behavior and incorporate morality into their value system. People with a high sense of moral meaningfulness may engage in actions of moral courage regardless of anonymity, whereas those with a lower sense of moral meaningfulness may depend more on anonymity to express their moral courage. This is indeed what we found: Anonymity plays a particularly important role in promoting moral courage among individuals with a lower sense of moral meaningfulness.
Finally, we looked at actual moral courage behaviors online using crawler technology. With their permission, we examined our participants’ posts on a major social media platform in the past three years prior to the study. We also measured the participants’ perceived anonymity on the platform. Posts with moral expressions were identified, among which those demonstrating the moral courage of the author were counted. We found that people who perceived greater anonymity on the platform posted more frequently about moral issues and demonstrated greater moral courage on the platform.
Concluding remarks
Without a doubt, anonymity can be abused and can have many dark sides (e.g., cyber-aggression). Also, transparency is required in many situations, such as legislative votes where elected representatives are held accountable for their actions and choices. Still, in situations where moral courage is called for, anonymity can protect those in powerless positions from being intimidated or silenced. It allows individuals to express and act on their views without the fear of social pressure or regulatory repression, which is critical for promoting civic engagement and building better communities and a more democratic society.
