The Role of Shame and Virtues in the Self-Regulation of Decisions to Engage in Digital Piracy

Abstract

Digital piracy of DVDs, software, and music is a prevalent behavior worldwide and has significant financial and social costs for society. Yet legal remedies and technological ways of controlling digital piracy are expensive and often do not work. To address a need for study of moral reasoning in digital piracy decisions, we develop and test a model of moral behavior that relies on self-control. Two kinds of shame are examined in separate experiments: indirect shame, where a shamed person overhears a friend condemning digital piracy but the friend is unware that the person overhearing the criticism has in fact committed digital piracy, and direct shame where a person becomes aware that his or her friend has in fact committed digital piracy and reprimands him or her. Findings show that both kinds of felt shame can be induced to affect such behaviors as decisions to discontinue digital piracy, giving advice or discouraging others not to engage in digital piracy, giving money to anti-digital piracy causes, reporting people who commit acts of digital piracy, signing a petition against digital piracy, and supporting legislation and fines against digital piracy. We examine two boundary conditions of felt shame: values of personal ambition and equality that function as automatic cognitions regulating the shame and through it digital piracy. Hypotheses were tested on a sample of 300 adults.