Browsing by Subject "anonymity"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Evaluating Peers in Cyberspace: The Impact of Anonymity
    (2016) Christie, Charlene; Dill, Emily
    This research examined the question of whether the anonymity found in most types of computer-mediated communication (CMC) impacted individual reactions to people who agreed or disagreed with their own opinions. Participants (N = 256) evaluated other respondents who voiced an attitude that was either similar or dissimilar to the one they endorsed. The social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE; Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995), suggests that anonymous group members will experience a heightened sense of social identity and show an increased likelihood of protecting that group by disparaging those who disagree with their beliefs. However, in the absence of a salient ingroup, we fail to find support for this. In contrast, we provide evidence that the impact of anonymity on interpersonal evaluations of peers is moderated by individual difference factors. Only those participants with high self-esteem, low levels of social anxiousness, or an elevated sense of autonomy evaluated targets more negatively when anonymous rather than identifiable. The current research suggests that any models used to understand anonymity's effects in CMC situations will need to carefully consider both social and personal identity characteristics.
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    Transparent, Auditable, and Stepwise Verifiable Online E-Voting Enabling an Open and Fair Election
    (MDPI, 2017-08-17) Zou, Xukai; Li, Huian; Li, Feng; Peng, Wei; Sui, Yan; Computer and Information Science, School of Science
    Many e-voting techniques have been proposed but not widely used in reality. One of the problems associated with most existing e-voting techniques is the lack of transparency, leading to a failure to deliver voter assurance. In this work, we p verifiable, viewable, and mutual restraining e-voting protocol that exploits the existing multi-party political dynamics such as in the US. The new e-voting protocol consists of three original technical contributions—universal verifiable voting vector, forward and backward mutual lock voting, and in-process check and enforcement—that, along with a public real time bulletin board, resolves the apparent conflicts in voting such as anonymity vs. accountability and privacy vs. verifiability. Especially, the trust is split equally among tallying authorities who have conflicting interests and will technically restrain each other. The voting and tallying processes are transparent/viewable to anyone, which allow any voter to visually verify that his vote is indeed counted and also allow any third party to audit the tally, thus, enabling open and fair election. Depending on the voting environment, our interactive protocol is suitable for small groups where interaction is encouraged, while the non-interactive protocol allows large groups to vote without interaction.