Attitudes toward Surveillance: Personality, Belief and Value Correlates

Adrian Furnham,Viren Swami

doi:10.4236/psych.2019.105039

Abstract

Two hundred and fifty adults completed a number of questionnaires about their attitudes to surveillance. They included measures of personality, paranoia, political cynicism, attitudes to authority, belief in conspiracy theories and the Big Five personality traits. The 25-item, surveillance scale, developed for this study, factored neatly into pro- and anti-surveillance attitudes. The strongest and most consistent correlates were attitudes to authority and political cynicism. Regressions indicated that the most powerful correlates of pro-surveillance attitudes were attitudes to authority, trait openness, conformity and right-wing authoritarianism. The most powerful anti-surveillance correlates were attitudes to authority, political cynicism, belief in conspiracy theories and paranoia. Implications and limitations of this study are considered.

Highlights

It is difficult to get accurate figures on the number and growth of CCTV cameras in any town or country, as these will not be released by various authorities who use them
We examined whether there were personality correlates of these beliefs
To assess the factor structure of the SAQ, we used Maximum Likelihood (ML) Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), as our data met the criteria of normal distribution of items by Q-Q plot distribution (Ghasemi & Zahediasl, 2012) for the ML fitting procedure

Summary

Introduction

It is difficult to get accurate figures on the number and growth of CCTV cameras in any town or country, as these will not be released by various authorities who use them. They are in both private and public hands, and both inside and outside buildings. Members of the public may or may not know how and when they are monitored by cameras and other sensors. There are journals dedicated to the topic as well as edited books resulting from symposia (Danielson, 2005; Goold, 2003)

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