The impact of a simulated Social Credit System on personal autonomy
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2021-01-29
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en
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Abstract
In this thesis, a simpli ed version of the Social Credit System is replicated in a webapplication
under the name SCREDDIT: Social Credit Rating Experiment with Daily
Digitally Implemented Tasks. The Social Credit System is a system that has been
invented by the Chinese Communist Party to encourage trustworthiness of each individual
and organizational actor. The Social Credit System rewards or punishes citizens
based on their Social Credit Score and their score can increase or decrease based on
their monitored individual behaviour. With the help of SCREDDIT, this thesis investigates
autonomy and in particular the justi cation and appropriation of the actions and
decisions of the participants. This is investigated by means of a digital system that
proposes tasks and consequently assigns or subtracts reward points from their personal
credit score. Tasks were followed by a questionnaire aimed at assessing the degree of
internal motivation (or autonomous motivation) and external motivation (or controlled
motivation), according to a validated scale (SIMS). Autonomous motivation is assessed
by identi ed/internal regulation and the reversed scales of external regulation, since this
category is the opposite of identi ed/internal regulation.
Subjects were requested to do two kinds of tasks that were called \Daily Life" and
\Meaningless". The former were tasks that one would normally do in their everyday
life, and that subjects, I argued, would thus complete of their own accord. Meaningless
tasks were so nonsensical tasks that, I reasoned, nobody would complete them of their
own accord. To research if someone can be socially manipulated in their choices by this
simple digital simulation, two groups were tested, an experimental group and a control
group. The control group was tested without a scoring and reward system in place, but
only with a task giving system.
The Daily Life tasks served as a baseline category. There should be no di erence
between autonomous motivation of the control and experimental group. These two
groups were tested on equivalence of average autonomous motivation for Daily Life
tasks. However, the groups were not signi cantly equivalent in terms of autonomous
motivation for the Daily Life tasks. The Daily Life tasks did thus not serve as baseline.
Thereafter, I researched whether a simulation of a technologically mediated Social
Credit System in
uences autonomy, and in particular the justi cation and appropriation
of actions and decisions. The experimental group was expected to display a bigger discrepancy
between the report of autonomous motivation of the externally imposed tasks
(Meaningless) and the actual reason of completing the tasks, which is that they were
externally motivated. In other words, the experimental group was expected to have internalized/
appropriated the reasons for their actions more than the control group in the
class of Meaningless tasks. From the data it can be concluded that the control group's
average autonomous motivation is not signi cantly di erent from the experimental average
autonomous motivation for Meaningless tasks. However, the data did suggest that
the control group felt more externally motivated for the Meaningless tasks than the exiperimental group and scored one point higher on the Situational Motivation Scale for
this category. After observing this e ect it was tested whether the individual categories
within autonomous motivation played a role in the insigni cance of this research question.
For these separate categories, there is no signi cant di erence between the two
groups for the Meaningless tasks. This shows that one category within autonomous motivation
did not cause the research question to be insigni cant, but both categories were
insigni cant individually and thus also together. Since both the baseline and the social
manipulation condition for this research question are insigni cant, these two conditions
were not tested on a signi cant di erence together. It can be concluded that the Social
Credit System's reward dynamics simulated in SCREDDIT cannot socially manipulate
participants and the participants did not score statistically equivalent for autonomous
motivation in the Daily Life tasks.
Subsequently, it was assessed whether there is a relation between the number of
Meaningless tasks completed by the participants and their internal motivation. However,
there is no signi cant (positive) correlation between the number of Meaningless tasks
completed and autonomous motivation for Meaningless tasks in the experimental group.
Finally, for the second research question could be concluded from the literature
that the Social Credit System is leaning more towards a punishment system, with clear
sanctions but vague rewards.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen