deindividuation

deindividuation, phenomenon in which people engage in seemingly impulsive, deviant, and sometimes violent acts in situations in which they believe they cannot be personally identified (e.g., in groups and crowds and on the Internet). The term deindividuation was coined by the American social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s to describe situations in which people cannot be individuated or isolated from others.

Some deindividuated situations can reduce accountability, because people who are hidden within a group cannot be easily traced or blamed for their actions. Thus, the effects of deindividuation are sometimes viewed as socially undesirable (e.g., rioting). However, research has shown that deindividuation also strengthens adherence to group norms. Sometimes those norms conflict with the norms of society at large, but they are not always negative. Indeed, the effects of deindividuation can be rather inconsequential (e.g., “letting loose” on the dance floor) or even positive (e.g., helping people).

Origins of deindividuation theory

Theories of crowd behaviour provided the origins of modern deindividuation theory. In particular, the work of Gustave Le Bon in 19th-century France promulgated a politically motivated criticism of crowd behaviour. At the time, French society was volatile, and protests and riots were commonplace. Le Bon’s work described group behaviour as irrational and fickle, and it therefore found much support at the time. Le Bon believed that being in a crowd allowed individuals to act on impulses that would normally be controlled or self-censored.

Le Bon argued that such undesirable behaviours can arise through three mechanisms. First, anonymity prevents people from being isolated or identified, which leads to a feeling of being untouchable and to a loss of a sense of personal responsibility. Le Bon further argued that such loss of control leads to contagion, in which a lack of responsibility spreads throughout the crowd and everyone begins to think and act in the same manner. Finally, people in crowds become more suggestible.

In the 1920s the British-born American psychologist William McDougall argued that crowds bring out people’s instinctive primary emotions, such as anger and fear. Because everyone experiences those basic emotions and because people are less likely to have more complex emotions in common, the basic emotions will spread rapidly within a crowd as people express them. It was argued that that process, similar to Le Bon’s idea of contagion, leads to uncontrolled and impulsive behaviour.

The role of accountability

Modern theories have applied and extended early principles to understand people’s behaviour in smaller groups and in other contexts, such as when people have the opportunity to interact with others while concealing their identity and remaining anonymous.

Following Le Bon, Festinger and his colleagues proposed that being deindividuated (in particular within a group) reduces normal constraints on behaviour and encourages people to do things they normally would not do, because they are not directly accountable for their actions. They are in a sense liberated to do what they like. Festinger found support for that idea by demonstrating that participants who engaged in a group discussion about their parents while being dressed alike in a dimly lit room were more likely to make negative comments than were participants in a control group. In other words, the deindividuated situation allowed participants to express views that they would normally keep to themselves.

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In the 1960s and ’70s the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo investigated the variables that lead to deindividuation and the behaviours that result from it. According to Zimbardo, factors leading to a state of deindividuation include anonymity; shared, diffused, or abandoned responsibility; altered temporal perspective (so that the individual focuses more on the here and now than on the past or present); physiological arousal; sensory overload; novel or unstructured situations; and altered states of consciousness (such as those brought about by the use of alcohol or drugs). Zimbardo claimed that those factors and others act to minimize self-observation and evaluation, reduce concern for social evaluation, and weaken controls based on feelings of guilt, shame, fear, and commitment. Thus, thresholds for expressing inhibited behaviours are lowered, and those behaviours are typically impulsive and often negative and antisocial.

In the 1970s Zimbardo conducted a series of experiments in which participants were deindividuated by being dressed in robes in the style of the Ku Klux Klan. In one experiment, female participants were asked to deliver shocks to another female participant (who was in fact a confederate) as a response to incorrect answers in a learning task. Results revealed that the deindividuated participants gave shocks that were twice as long in duration as those given by participants who were not dressed in the deindividuating clothing. Zimbardo and his colleagues also carried out what became a landmark experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which student participants were deindividuated as prisoners or prison guards in a simulated prison setting at Stanford University. The students in the position of guards were physically brutal to the students who were deindividuated as prisoners, so much so that the experiment had to be terminated early.

The American psychologist Ed Diener provided a theoretical clarification of Zimbardo’s theory by introducing the concept of objective self-awareness. According to Diener, objective self-awareness is high when attention is drawn inward toward the self and people actively monitor their own behaviour; it is low when focus is directed outward and behaviour is monitored less or not at all. Deindividuation is caused by a reduction in objective self-awareness, and factors that can reduce self-awareness (e.g., anonymity or being in a group) can bring about deindividuation. Under conditions of deindividuation, attention is therefore drawn away from the self, and people are less capable of monitoring their behaviour in relation to internal norms and standards.

To support this idea, Diener and his colleagues observed the behaviour of more than 1,300 children one Halloween in the 1970s, focusing on 27 homes where, on their visit, the trick-or-treating children were invited to take one candy from a table. Half of the children were asked where they lived and were asked for their names; half were not asked for this individuating information. Results revealed that deindividuated children and children in groups were more than twice as likely to take more than one candy. Diener and his colleagues argued that the groups and anonymous children transgressed because the deindividuating conditions reduced their objective self-awareness and freed them from the normal constraints on their impulse to take more candies.

In the 1980s the American psychologists Steven Prentice-Dunn and Ronald Rogers reformulated Diener’s theory by introducing the distinction between public and private self-awareness in deindividuated contexts. Public self-awareness is said to decrease as a result of anonymity, so that people become less aware of how they appear publicly to others. Anonymous individuals, for example, are less aware of how they present themselves, and, as a result, their behaviour will tend to be antinormative, or against accepted norms and standards. Also, private self-awareness, or awareness of internal norms and standards, decreases because of the physiological arousal of being in a group and the high levels of group cohesiveness. People therefore become less aware of their internal standards of behaviour, which will also lead them to behave more impulsively. Deindividuation, then, is said to influence behaviour by reducing the level of explicit control that people have over their thoughts and actions.