Sociocultural factors influence young people’s attitude towards the harvesting of non-conscious emotional data

Abstract

This paper first reviews the worrying trend of increasing use of emotion-sensing devices and non-conscious data collection through AI technologies. Next, it examines university students’ attitudes towards non-conscious harvesting of emotional data by the government and private sectors in a dataset of 1,015 survey responses of students from 48 countries and 8 regions worldwide with the Bayesian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo approach. The empirical results highlight the explanatory significance of sociocultural factors as well as the psychological mechanism behind technological acceptance. They also demonstrate the advantage of traditional theories such as Davis’s “Technological Acceptance Model” in the inclusion of cross-cultural factors such as religions and regions, given the transfer of new technologies across borders. The male gender, a higher income, and a business major appear as reliable predictors of little/no anxiety toward non-conscious data collection by the government and private sector. Whether the data harvester is the government, or the private sector seems to play a subtle, yet decisive role in people’s acceptance of the new technologies, especially in relation to the Muslim and Christian population. These empirical results carry important policy and governance implications which are discussed in the paper.