Hackers' Motivations: Testing Schwartz's Theory of Motivational Types of Values in a Sample of Hackers

IntroductionThe activity of hacking is a contested topic as scientists, practitioners, the general public, and even hackers themselves continuously debate about what "hacking" exactly is and who can be considered a hacker. The definition of hacking has changed over time, as well as its connotation, which in turn influenced the way hackers are perceived. Levy (2010) has extensively investigated the hacker culture, starting with the hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fifties and sixties. Initially, the word "hack" was used to describe elaborate college pranks by MIT students that had nothing to do with computers. In the late fifties, the use of this term changed quickly when a few young students became intrigued with the large mainframes at their university. Once they had access to these computers, they worked day and night to explore their possibilities by debugging existing programmes and writing new programmes. By this time, a hack represented an act involving the computer that demonstrated "innovation, style, and technical virtuosity" (Levy, 2010, p. 10). This pride in hacking was stripped during the eighties when law enforcement, popular press, and private corporations began to criminalise hacking activities and portray hackers as disobedient citizens, or worse: as enemies of the state (Nissenbaum, 2004; Halbert, 1997; Kilger, Stutzman, & Arko, 2004; Taylor, 2005). Indeed, several hackers did cause great damage to companies and individuals, and consequently to society at large (Nissenbaum, 2004; Australian Institute of Criminology, 2005). However, focusing only on hackers with destructive intents hampers the garnering of insight into hackers' minds. This narrow focus also neglects the fact that hackers form a heterogeneous community (Barber, 2001). The tendency to classify hackers as either 'good' or 'bad' appears to decrease in the literature with the emergence of less judgmental categories, such as hacktivists (hacker activists; Conway, 2003; Woo, Kim, & Dominick, 2009) and script kiddies (novice hackers; Nissenbaum, 2004). More elaborate classifications are based on motivation or intent, but still tend to classify hackers as malicious or non-malicious, since such classifications are often aimed at aiding criminal profiling (Rogers, 2006; Meyers, 2009; Smith & Rupp, 2002). The few studies that examined the motivations of hackers most often adopted a phenomenological-interpretive approach by interviewing hackers (Jordan & Taylor, 1998; Turgeman-Goldschmidt, 2005; Hutchings, 2013). This approach enables researchers to examine the social and cultural reality from the interviewees' point of view. In other words, hackers are asked to freely express their motivations and the researcher uses their accounts to build a theory (Turgeman-Goldschmidt, 2005). While this type of research certainly has its benefits, the pitfall is that the accounts reported by hackers might be more reflective of culturally recognised motivations than their true personal motivations (Campbell & Kennedy, 2009). Personal motivations can be rather implicit and people might therefore not even be aware of them. The present study examines hackers' motivations by employing an empirically based motivational theory, namely Schwartz's (1992) Theory of Motivational Types of Values.As previously stated, the hacker community is not homogeneous and hacking is still inconsistently defined. Therefore, in this paper a definition of hacking is employed that captures the diversity of the community and its activities, yet adheres to elements often associated with hacking. These elements are: (1) innovative use of technology, (2) eagerness to explore systems, and (3) programming (The Hacker's Dictionary, 2001; Taylor, 2005; Caelli, Longley, & Shain (1989) in Warren & Leitch, 2010). The definition found in the literature on hacking that best incorporates these elements is put forward by Alleyne (2011, p. …