Study Finds Anti-Piracy Messages Backfire, Especially For Men

jbmartin6 shares a report from Phys.Org: Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%. This paper studies how effective anti-piracy messages are as a deterrent, examining the change in TV and film piracy intentions among 962 adults compared with their past behavior. The three messages examined in the study were verbatim copies of three real-world anti-piracy campaigns. Two of the campaigns used threatening messages to try to combat piracy and the third was educational in tone.

One of the threatening messages was from crime reduction charity, Crimestoppers, which focused on the individual's risk of computer viruses, identity fraud, money and data theft and hacking. The other message was based on a campaign by the French government, which used a 'three strike' process, whereby infringers were given two written warnings before their internet access was terminated. The educational message was taken from the campaign 'Get It Right from a Genuine Site,' which focuses on the cost to the economy and to the individual creative people, and signposts consumers away from piracy sites and towards legal platforms such as Spotify or Netflix.

The study found that one threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50%, but men increase their piracy behaviors. The educational messages had no effect on either men or women. 'The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance,' explained [lead author, Kate Whitman, from the University of Portsmouth's Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime]. 'From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite.' Moreover, the study found that participants with the most favorable attitudes towards piracy demonstrated the most polarized changes in piracy intentions -- the threatening messages increased their piracy even more.
The study has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics.

'I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that,' adds Slashdot reader jbmartin6.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.