Deindividuation

One of the areas of social interaction that social psychology focuses on is crowd behavior, or, why individuals sometimes and in some circumstances feel compelled to act as a collective (e.g. in riots, protests, or other forms of group action). Social psychology has been able to identify patterns, processes, and boundaries associated with crowd behavior. One such process is deindividuation. Deindividuation refers to the way that groups can absorb individuals such that they lose their sense of identity and react to a situation based on the atmosphere created by a group (Moreland & Hogg, 1993). A consequence of this loss of identity is an accompanying sense of anonymity and diffused responsibility. People who experience this process may find themselves engaging in actions and practices that they would not do in normal circumstances. Therefore, deindividuation is a description of a group process that also has moral and ethical dimensions.

Keywords Deindividuation; Disinhibition; Antisocial Behavior; Conformity; Anonymity; Suggestibility; Contagion; Emergent Norms

Social Interaction in Groups & Organizations > Deindividuation

Overview

Social psychology, which emerged in the 19th century but really expanded after World War II, is concerned with the study of face-to-face interaction and interaction within small groups such as the family or organizations. It is influenced by both psychology (and its emphasis on behavior and the mind) and sociology (and its emphasis on the importance of symbols and interpretation in the creation of social meaning). Like psychology in general, social psychology uses scientific methods "to understand and explain how the thought, feeling and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of other human beings" (Allport, 1985). As such, it focuses on group and nonverbal behavior, social perception, leadership and other topics such as conformity, aggression and prejudice.

One of the areas of social interaction that social psychology focuses on is crowd behavior, or, in other words, why individuals sometimes and in some circumstances feel compelled to act as a collective (e.g. in riots, protests, or other forms of group action). At the turn of the 20th century, social psychologists (and those also associated with sociology at that time, such as Emile Durkheim) were interested in explaining what compels people with little otherwise in common to act in similar ways at a single point in time (Worchel, 2003). Their interest in part stemmed from an assumption that crowd, or mass behavior was to some extent irrational and out of control. However, social psychology has, in the interim, been able to identify patterns, processes and boundaries associated with crowd behavior. One such process is deindividuation. Deindividuation refers to the way that groups can "suck in" individuals such that they lose their sense of identity and react to a situation based on the atmosphere created by a group (Moreland & Hogg, 1993). A consequence of this loss of identity is an accompanying sense of anonymity and diffused responsibility. People who experience this process may find themselves engaging in actions and practices that they would not do in normal circumstances. Therefore, deindividuation is a description of a group process that has also moral and ethical dimensions.

Collective Behavior & Crowds

Crowds are typically defined as large numbers of people in close proximity to each other characterized by a common concern (e.g. spectators at a sports event). In theory, crowds can be focused and instrumental (people attending a political rally) or expressive and unstructured (participants at Burning Man in the Nevada desert) although in practice, instrumentally focused crowds can also be emotional and expressive. Collective behavior usually refers to behaviors that occur in groups that are not governed by the normal conventions of social interaction, that is, among crowds. Crowd psychology is:

Such behavior might include the "wave" that is typically found at baseball or other sporting events or the collective hysteria that accompanied the broadcast of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds in 1938. It includes large-scale spontaneous celebrations or demonstrations (e.g. rock festivals or mass responses to political changes, such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989). However, not all collective or crowd behavior is benign and some of it involves violence and aggression, such as the Nazi rallies of the 1930s and the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Moreover, inherent in studying crowd behavior is the notion that any individual can, by virtue of being part of a crowd, be compelled to engage in behaviors that she would not normally engage in. Social psychologists are interested in explaining such behavior beyond labeling it as the outcome of troublemakers or as random acts of madness, and in examining how the group contributes to such behaviors.

Further Insights

Explaining Crowd Behavior

Psychoanalysis has been used to understand the irrational and unpredictable aspects of crowd behavior. For instance, Freud suggested that when someone becomes part of a crowd, the super-ego, which in normal circumstances helps to maintain society's moral standards and civilized conventions, is displaced by the leader of the crowd (Hogg, 1996). The leader symbolizes the "primal father" to whom people regress in crowd situations and individual unconscious is effectively "unlocked" in ways that unleash uncivilized, primordial behaviors. Other early understandings of crowd behavior also emphasized this unruly and unpredictable side to crowd behavior.

In the 19th century, Gustave Le Bon was one of the first social psychologists to conduct research on crowds. He became interested in crowd behavior by reading classic accounts of crowd behavior during the French revolution in novels such as Emile Zola's Germinal (Hogg, 1996). In particular he was fascinated by the way such accounts described how crowds seem to change from civilized to animalistic behavior. Concomitantly, his own book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), described how an individual's behavior transforms when in a crowd. One of his basic premises is that a crowd has the ability to psychologically take control of an individual's mind, and the person thus becomes weak and prone to the deviant behavior that is suggested by the group that has formed. In essence, the person becomes a "puppet" of the group and the group develops a "crowd mind" (i.e. herd instinct or mass imitation) that is primitive and homogenous.

Le Bon (1908) identified three components that contribute to crowd behavior (i.e. behavior that was no longer bounded by normal social conventions and was in contrast animalistic):

• Anonymity,
• Suggestibility and
• Contagion.

First, he argued that members of a crowd became universally irrational because of the anonymity that accompanies crowd membership. This encourages people to no longer feel responsible for their actions. Second, he observed that ideas spread rapidly through crowds and, like many other theorists of the period, he drew on medical metaphors to describe this process as a form of contagion. Third, he claimed that crowds are suggestive because of the way they permit the release of antisocial motives.

Although many scholars have challenged his theory because of its unscientific basis, it has nonetheless influenced the study of crowd behavior as a specialist branch within social psychology. In particular, social psychologists developed Le Bon's ideas into what is now known as deindividuation theory.

Deindividuation Theory

In modern societies that are accompanied by a strong emphasis on the individual as unique and highly identifiable, people are typically constrained from indulging in anti-social behaviors by shared moral codes and social conventions. In small groups, such conventions are continually reinforced through face-to-face interaction and shared awareness of the consequences of ignoring or flouting such constraints. In crowds, the recognition provided by face-to-face interaction is relaxed or even non-existent in ways that contribute to a sense of anonymity, which, as Le Bon argued, minimizes the sense of responsibility that people feel over their own actions. Some researchers have suggested that a person's personality and behavior may become anti-normative in crowd scenarios and focus on explaining why the average rational person can allow an incited crowd to change his or her normal behavior. This process of transition is called deindividuation and entails a loss of identity. It draws on Carl Jung's concept of individuation, which involves differentiation from others in the goal of developing an individual personality.

Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb (1952) developed the term deindividuation. According to deindividuation theory, an individual's psychological state can be altered once the person becomes a participant in a crowd or large group, because people do not pay attention to other people as individuals, and in turn, do not feel that other people are paying attention to them. Therefore, Festinger et al. argued that people in a group or crowd lose their sense of an individual self: they are literally submerged in the crowd. As a result, the person is not in touch with the norms that the environment has in place, and the person tends to lose both self-restraint and sense of normal regulations of behavior.

Deindividuation can thus be considered a process in which a person becomes anonymous as a result of shedding his or her identity. A number of studies in the 1960s and 1970s examined processes of deindividuation.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Phillip Zimbardo, a researcher at Stanford University in 1960s, observed that when people lose their sense of identity (or their sense of self-awareness), they also lose a sense of cause and effect, or of relationship between action and consequence, because actions seem to be unhinged from normal social conventions. Different circumstances can lead to deindividuation, including:

• Anonymity,
• Loss of individual responsibility,
• Arousal,
• Sensory overload,
• Unstructured situations and
• Consciousness-altering substances such as drugs and alcohol (Postmes & Spears, 1998, p. 239).

A number of laboratory experiments have supported deindividuation theory, notably Zimbardo's own study at Stanford in the 1960s, known as the "Stanford Prison Experiment." The purpose of this study (1969), funded by a US Naval Research grant, was to examine antisocial behavior in general and in particular, to examine the development of norms and the effects of roles, labels, and social expectations in a simulated prison environment. More than 75 people responded to an advertisement that Zimbardo placed in a local newspaper asking for volunteers to take part in a study of the psychology of imprisonment. Each was randomly assigned the role of either guard or prisoner. Prisoners remained in the prison for the duration of the study and guards rotated on 8-hour shifts. Local police were recruited to "arrest" those who became prisoners, and prison guards created a list of rules that they expected prisoners to follow. Zimbardo himself notes that the most significant aspect of this study was that the simulation became so real, and the guards became so abusive, that the experiment had to be shut down after only 6 days rather than the two weeks as planned. The prisoners suffered extreme emotional distress and abuse, and there was a rapid and unpredicted degeneration of moral conventions.

Why were the guards able to "simulate" so realistically? Zimbardo's answer to this question was that when people are in situations where their individuality is eroded or displaced, they slip into predefined roles. Moreover, when individuality is removed or hidden, people will behave in ways that ignore moral standards (and may be accompanied by aggression) because they feel disinhibited. For instance, in another study, Zimbardo (1970) had people administer electric shocks to other participants. One group of participants who were administering shocks covered their faces with hoods and the other group did not. He found that if the participants believed that the people being shocked didn't know them (i.e. they were anonymous), they administered more shocks at stronger levels.

Recent research supports the idea that when people think their identities are hidden or unknown, they are more likely to break rules and even participate in violence. For instance, one study of politically motivated violent assault in Northern Ireland showed that attackers who disguised their identities were more violent and aggressive in the severity of assault they administered to their victims (Silke, 2003). Similarly, when identities are hidden or disguised in cyberspace, they contribute to deindividuation. A study of how young people talk about themselves on the Internet and what they say showed that anonymity was strongly correlated with sexual self-disclosure. Since the users were anonymous to each other, they felt free of others people's evaluations and criticisms and thus did and said things they would not otherwise not have done. Young men in particular were more likely to self-disclose even when the effect of deindividuation decreased (i.e. when aspects of their real identities became known) (Chiou, 2006).

Self-Awareness

For many researchers, self-awareness plays a central role, since in the group situation, self-awareness is reduced and consequently, there are fewer external restraints on people's behavior and people are less able to self-regulate. Prentice-Dunn and Rogers (1982) argued that disinhibited behavior in a crowd situation occurs because self-awareness has both a public and private component. First, in a crowd situation, there are accountability cues such as anonymity and diffused responsibility, which decrease public self-awareness, so that people become unconcerned about negative consequences for their behavior. For instance, a person in a crowd situation may do something they know wouldn't do outside of crowd situations, because they know they are unlikely to be punished. Second, there are attentional cues (e.g. group cohesiveness and physiological arousal) that decrease private self-awareness in ways that also reduce self-regulation (Postmes & Spears, 1998).

While in early theories the defining feature of deindividuation was reduced self-awareness, the absence of empirical support for the subjective state of deindividuation has prompted new approaches to research which place more emphasis on dynamics and processes with crowds, rather than within individuals.

Emergent Norms

When people are in a crowd there may be no clear social norms to regulate behavior, because there is no history or pattern of association through which such norms might develop (Turner & Killian, 1987). Crowds, in this view, are typically viewed as unstructured social groups. However, in the absence of apparent norms, distinctive behaviors (behaviors that seem out of the ordinary or unusual) may become apparent and influence the actions of other members. In fact, they imply a norm that crowd members might tacitly accept.

While Turner and Killian's theory suggests that norms emerge even in normless situations, and thus suggest that members of crowds communicate with each other in subtle ways (e.g. in non-verbal ways), other researchers have questioned the extent to which crowds are actually normless. For instance, because people who come together in crowds usually do so for a reason (despite Le Bon's assumption that crowds are spontaneous and animalistic), they actually bring with them a set of norms that each member is implicitly aware of (Reicher, et al. 1995). Consequently, people do not actually lose identity in the crowd; in fact, they assume an identity provided by crowd membership. This identity is accompanied by norms, which in some cases might include aggression or violence (or other anti-social behaviors).

Symbolic interactionists or ethnomethodologists might refer to these norms as social rules-implicit, tacit social codes that govern interaction. They exist in the background of interaction and become apparent only when we stop to call attention to them. However, while on the one hand deindividuation theory has suggested that immersion in the group or crowd produces antisocial or antinormative behavior, on the other, emergent norm theory implies that immersion in the group produces conformity.

Conformity occurs when members of the group acquiesce to perceived pressures from the other group members, although conformity may be the result of either general social norms or situational norms. In crowds, people categorize themselves as members and in so doing conform to context-specific or situational norms of conduct, which explains why different groups in a crowd event (e.g. with protesters and police) might react differently to the same environmental stimuli (Hogg, 1996).

Issues

The Limits of Deindividuation Theory

Nonetheless, although such studies have been used to support deindividuation theory, Zimbardo's work received criticism on a number of levels. First, laboratory experiments are somewhat limited because they lack external validity in real-life situations. Other studies have suggested that anonymity does not automatically lead to deindividuation (Hogg, 1996) and in general, it has been difficult to identify acceptable measurements of deindividuation that satisfy the requirements of empirical science (Loch & Conger, 1996). Second, research conducted on the influence of anonymity in groups is inconsistent and there is little supporting documentation for the psychological state of deindividuation (Diener, 1980). Third, the ethics of Zimbardo's research has been challenged because of the stress and suffering experienced by his participants.

Nonetheless, cumulatively, deindividuation research suggests that a deindividuated individual in a group situation is prevented from being aware of himself or herself as a separate individual, and consequently, is unable to regulate his or her behavior. Indeed, according to Harris (2006), the process is "used by groups to indoctrinate members into a larger 'whole' where the group norms are redefined. This process strips away the identity of the individual allowing for the group identity to take its place, making it easier to behave in a deviant fashion, since the group norms can differ greatly from societal norms" (p. 1). Therefore, a sane, rational person might hide in the shadows of the group as he or she participates in extreme deviant behavior. In addition, the person views his or her participation in the event as minimal and considers his or her role in antisocial behavior as insignificant.

Deindividuation is a widely described phenomenon concerning expressions of antinormative collective behavior. Research on deindividuation seeks to explain what compels members of crowds to behave in ways that are sometimes antisocial, uncivilized, and even violent (Diener, 1976). While deindividuation theory has helped to open crowd behavior to scholarly scrutiny, critics argue that it is too simplistic, relies too heavily on laboratory methods, focuses too much on the individual at the expense of the crowd, and ignores the coherence and uniformity that is typically associated with much crowd behavior. Hence, the early emphasis on instinctual or primordial emotions and psychodynamics has been largely replaced with emphasis on processes within crowds, rather than examining internal psychological states. Nonetheless, the deindividuation effect continues to be a valuable concept within social psychology, used to explore, in particular, the significance of anonymity in group situations, including situations where people become members of crowds.

Terms & Concepts

Antisocial Behavior: Actions that deviate significantly from established social norms.

Conformity: Action or behavior that corresponds with socially accepted standards, conventions, rules, or laws.

Deindividuation: The way that groups can absorb individuals such that they lose their sense of identity and react to a situation based on the atmosphere created by a group (Moreland & Hogg, 1993). A consequence of this loss of identity is an accompanying sense of anonymity and diffused responsibility.

Group Affiliation: A group of people who work together.

Anonymity: Anonymity accompanies crowd membership and encourages people to no longer feel responsible for their actions.

Suggestibility: Crowds are suggestive because of the way they permit the release of antisocial motives.

Contagion: Occurs when ideas spread rapidly through crowds and influence collective behavior.

Emergent Norms: Distinctive behaviors (behaviors that seem out of the ordinary or unusual) that become apparent and influence the actions of crowd members.

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Suggested Reading

Gorringe, H., Stott, C., & Rosie, M. (2012). Dialogue police, decision making, and the management of public order during protest crowd events. Journal of Investigative Psychology & Offender Profiling, 9, 111–125. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=76372172

Lee, E. (2007). Deindividuation Effects on Group Polarization in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Role of Group Identification, Public-Self-Awareness, and Perceived Argument Quality. Journal of Communication, 57, 385–403.

Mann, L., Newton, J., & Innes, J. (1982). A test between deindividuation and emergent norm theories of crowd aggression. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 42, 260–272.

Mullen, B., Migdal, M., & Rozell, D. (n.d.). Self-awareness, deindividuation, and social identity: unraveling theoretical paradoxes by filling empirical lacunae. Society for Personality & Social Psychology.

Reicher, S. (2011). Mass action and mundane reality: An argument for putting crowd analysis at the centre of the social sciences. Contemporary Social Science, 6, 433–449. Retrieved October 24, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=67285746