Deindividuation
Deindividuation is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as the loss of self-awareness in groups, although this is a matter of contention. For the social psychologist, the level of analysis is the individual in the context of a social situation. As such, social psychologists emphasize the role of internal psychological processes. Other social scientists, such as sociologists, are more concerned with broad social, economic, political, and historical factors that influence events in a given society.
Overview
Deindividuation theory seeks to provide an explanation for a variety of antinormative collective behavior, such as witch hunts, violent crowds and lynch mobs. There are a range of perspectives on the role deindividuation plays in producing anti-normative behaviors, and how contextual cues affect the rules of the deindividuation construct; it is proposed that it is a psychological state of decreased apprehension and self-evaluation, reducing inhibition and enabling antinormative behavior in participants. Deindividuation has also been suggested as a factor enabling genocide, as well as an explanation for antinormative behavior online in computer-mediated communications.Although generally analyzed in the context of negative behaviors, deindividuation has also been found to play a role in positive behaviors and experiences.
Major theoretical approaches and history
In contemporary social psychology, deindividuation refers to a diminishing of one's sense of individuality that occurs with behavior disjointed from personal or social standards of conduct. For example, someone who is an anonymous member of a mob will be more likely to act violently toward a police officer than a known individual. In one sense, a deindividuated state may be considered appealing if someone is affected such that he or she feels free to behave impulsively without mind to potential consequences. However, deindividuation has also been linked to "violent and anti-social behavior."Classic theories
was an early explorer of this phenomenon as a function of crowds. Le Bon introduced his crowd psychology theory in his 1895 publication The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind. The French psychologist characterized his posited effect of crowd mentality, whereby individual personalities become dominated by the collective mindset of the crowd. Le Bon viewed crowd behavior as "unanimous, emotional, and intellectually weak." He theorized that a loss of personal responsibility in crowds leads to an inclination to behave primitively and hedonistically by the entire group. This resulting mentality, according to Le Bon, belongs more to the collective than any individual, so that individual traits are submerged. Already, Le Bon was tending toward the conception of deindividuation as a state brought on by a lowering of accountability, resulting from a degree of anonymity due to membership within a crowd, where attention is shifted from the self to the more stimulating, external qualities of the group's action.Essentially, individuals of Le Bon's crowd are enslaved to the group's mindset and are capable of conducting the most violent and heroic acts. Le Bon's group-level explanation of behavioral phenomena in crowds inspired further theories regarding collective psychology from Freud, McDougall, Blumer, and Allport. Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb revisited Le Bon's ideas in 1952, coining the term deindividuation to describe what happens when persons within a group are not treated as individuals. According to these theorists, whatever attracts each member to a particular group causes them to put more emphasis on the group than on individuals.
This unaccountability inside a group has the effect of "reducing inner restraints and increasing behavior that is usually inhibited." Festinger et al. agreed with Le Bon's perception of behavior in a crowd in the sense that they believed individuals do become submerged into the crowd leading to their reduced accountability. However, these relatively modern theorists distinguished deindividuation from crowd theory by reforming the idea that the loss of individuality within a crowd is replaced by the group's mindset. Instead, Festinger et al. argued that the loss of individuality leads to loss of control over internal or moral constraints.
Alternatively, R. C. Ziller argued that individuals are subject to deindividuation under more specific situational conditions. For instance, he suggested that under rewarding conditions, individuals have the learned incentive to exhibit individualized qualities in order to absorb credit for themselves; whereas, under punishing conditions, individuals have the learned tendency to become deindividuated through submergence into the group as a means of diffusing responsibility.
P. G. Zimbardo suggested "the expression of normally inhibited behavior" may have both positive and negative consequences. He expanded the proposed realm of factors that contribute to deindividuation, beyond anonymity and loss of personal responsibility, to include: "arousal, sensory overload, a lack of contextual structure or predictability, and altered consciousness due to drugs or alcohol", as well as "altered time perspectives... and degree of involvement in group functioning." Zimbardo postulated that these factors lead to "loss of identity or loss of self-consciousness", which result in unresponsiveness to external stimuli by the individual and the loss of "cognitive control over motivations and emotions." Consequently, individuals reduce their compliance with good and bad sanctions held by influences outside the group.
Zimbardo was consistent with Festinger et al. in his suggestion that loss of individuality leads to a loss of control, causing affected persons to behave intensely and impulsively, having let go of internal restraints. However, he developed this model by specifying the "input variables" that lead to this loss of individuality, as well as the nature of behaviors that result. Zimbardo further developed existing deindividuation theory by suggesting these outcome behaviors are "self-reinforcing" and therefore difficult to cease. Moreover, Zimbardo did not restrict his application to group situations; he also applied deindividuation theory to "suicide, murder, and interpersonal hostility."
Contemporary theories
In the late seventies, Ed Diener began to express dissatisfaction with the current deindividuation hypothesis, which he deemed invalid without specific focus on the psychological processes that yield a deindividuated state. Not only was Zimbardo's model deficient in that respect, but the role of his input variables in causing anti-normative behaviors was not uniform. Consequently, Diener took it upon himself to refine Zimbardo's model by specifying further the internal processes which lead to deindividuation. In 1980, he argued that paying attention to one's personal values through self-awareness increases the ability of that person to self-regulate. In a group context, when attention is distributed outward away from the self, the individual loses the ability to plan his actions rationally and substitutes planned behaviors with a heightened responsiveness to environmental cues. Thus, according to Diener, the reduction of self-awareness is the "defining feature of deindividuation". Diener proposed that the strict focus on anonymity as the primary factor of deindividuation had created an empirical obstacle, calling for a redirection of empirical research on the topic.While Diener was able to take the focus away from anonymity in the theoretical evolution of deindividuation, he was unable to empirically clarify the function of reduced self-awareness in causing disinhibited behavior. In response to this ambiguity, Prentice-Dunn and Rogers extended Diener's model by distinguishing public self-awareness from private self-awareness. Public self-awareness they theorized to be reduced by "accountability cues", such as diffusion of responsibility or anonymity. Such factors, according to these theorists, cause members of a crowd to lose a sense of consequences for their actions; thus, they worry less about being evaluated and do not anticipate punishment. Private self-awareness, however, was reduced by "attentional cues", e.g., group cohesiveness and physiological arousal. This reduction leads to "an internal deindividuated state" that causes "decreased self-regulation and attention to internalized standards for appropriate behavior". The "differential self-awareness" theorists suggested both forms of self-awareness could lead to "antinormative and disinhibited behavior" but only the decreased private self-awareness process was in their definition of deindividuation.
SIDE
The most recent model of deindividuation, the social identity model of deindividuation effects, was developed by Russell Spears and Martin Lea in 1995. The SIDE model argues that deindividuation manipulations can have the effect of decreasing attention to individual characteristics and interpersonal differences within the group. They outlined their model by explaining that social identity performance can fulfill two general functions:- Affirming, conforming, or strengthening individual or group identities.
- Persuading audiences into adopting specific behaviors.
Classical and contemporary approaches agree on the main component of deindividuation theory that deindividuation leads to "anti-normative and disinhibited behavior".