Dr. Jason Bennett Thatcher,
Tandean Rustandy Endowed Esteemed Chair,
Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado-Boulder
will be presenting:
"Fury or Fright? Doxing and its Effects on Victims’ Civic Participation"
Abstract: Doxing, the malicious disclosure of personal information, has emerged globally as a means to influence sociopolitical discourse by targeting individuals for their viewpoints or affiliations regarding specific issues. Although issue-based doxing inflicts severe consequences on victims, including social isolation and significant mental health strain, research on the doxees’ perspective remains scarce. This study integrates psychological contract theory with affective events theory to examine doxees’ affective and behavioral responses to being doxed. Specifically, we investigate how doxing is perceived as a breach of the implicit social contract between citizens and society, evokes fear and anger, and subsequently affects doxees’ civic participation. Using an online vignette experiment in the context of U.S. school boards, we examine in-person citizen engagement and online discursive participation as critical outcome variables across physical and cyber domains. Furthermore, we assess the role of doxees’ convictions about the target issue in moderating the impact of doxing. Our findings advance research on the societal effects of adversarial online behavior in three significant ways: (1) by shifting the focus to the victim’s perspective and exploring how fear and anger affect doxees’ civic participation, (2) by extending previous literature to investigate the cross-domain effects of online adversarial behavior, and (3) by revealing that only individuals with strong convictions tend to sustain active civic participation in the face of doxing-like scrutiny, which highlights how doxing intensifies ideological polarization. Our work has timely implications for online platforms and policymakers.
Bio: Dr. Jason Bennett Thatcher is the Tandean Rustandy Endowed Esteemed Chair in the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He also holds a faculty appoint as a Full Professor of Management Science at the Alliance Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester and an Honorary Professorship at the University of Nottingham. He has also held visiting faculty appointments at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the University of Augsburg, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the Information Technology University-Copenhagen.
Jason serves as Senior Editor at Information Systems Research and Journal of the Association for Information Systems. He has served as Senior Editor at the MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences, AIS Transactions on HCI, and Associate Editor at Information Systems Research and the Database for Advances of Information Systems. He also serves on the MIS Quarterly Policy Committee, as the Information Systems Community representative.
Jason is a past President of the Association for Information Systems. He was named an AIS Fellow in 2019 and received the Sandra Slaugher Service Award in 2020.
Jason enjoys working with early career scholars. He has advised 19 PhD students in the United States and 15 more in Denmark, Germany, and China. He runs an active LinkedIn feed for early career scholars that has attracted 34,000+ followers and 18 million+ views a year. Jason was named to the Circle of Compadres by the KPMG Foundation for contributions to mentoring minority Ph.D. students and a TUM Ambassador for his work with PhD students in Germany.
Details:
Type: Hybrid Event
Time: Thursday, February 29, 2024, 1 to 2:30pm.
Location: Room 1350
Zoom link: https://ivey-uwo.zoom.us/j/95083202844
Light refreshments will be available before the start of the seminar.
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