Encountering “404 Not Found”: The Psychology of Censorship Experience

• In Event: Elites Behaving Badly

Abstract

While liberal democracies face significant challenges from polarization and populism, authoritarian regimes now harness sophisticated technologies for strengthening propaganda, censorship and surveillance. Despite the fact that censorship occurs on an everyday basis in many places of the world, it remains not fully answered how people respond. Using the framework of Psychological Reactance Theory, we conducted two between-subjects experiments among college students in China. In Study 1, a total of 195 participants were randomly assigned to two conditions: while the control group gained immediate access to news articles once they clicked on the titles, the treatment group encountered a bad webpage suggesting the post was censored. Following a few questions, the treatment group was presented a screenshot, which claimed to be the censored content that was saved before the post was deleted. We find that people react to censorship by becoming more likely to search for, circulate, and discuss the issues than others in the control group. In Study 2, we replicated Study 1 on two different issues (N = 227) and found the same effect. Using a Structural Equation Model, we further identified the feeling of information deprivation as the key mechanism that had impacted behaviors. One exhibits anti-social behaviors such as reserving valuable information for oneself and making fewer amount of donation as a result of experiencing information deprivation. In addition, one’s general trust toward authorities, political trust toward the central government, and collectivistic orientation are all significantly and negatively correlated with behaviors of searching, discussing, and spreading the censored content. The more one trusts authorities and the central government, and the more collectivistic one is, the less likely one is to become resistant to censorship.

Author

• Kaiping Zhang, Tsinghua University