Deindividuation
The Misconception: People who riot and loot are scum who were just looking for an excuse to steal and be violent.
The Truth: You are are prone to losing your individuality and becoming absorbed into a hivemind under the right conditions.
Source: Improv Everywhere
When a crowd gathers near a suicidal jumper something terrible is unleashed.
In Seattle in 2001, a 26-year-old woman who had recently ended a relationship held up traffic for a little too long as she considered the implications of leaping to her death. As motorists began to back-up on the bridge and become irate, they started yelling “Jump, bitch, jump!” until she did.
Cases like this aren’t unusual.
In 2008, a 17-year old man jumped from the top of a parking garage in England after 300 or so people chanted for him to go for it. Some took photos and recorded video before, during and after. Afterward, the crowd dispersed, the strange spell broken. The taunters walked away wondering what came over them. The other onlookers vented their disgust into social media.
In San Francisco, in 2010, a man stepped onto the ledge of his apartment window and contemplated dropping from the building. A crowd gathered below and soon started yelling for him to jump. They even tweeted about it. He died on impact fifteen minutes later.
“i was there and im traumatized. the guys next to me were laughing telling him to jump and videotaping the whole thing. i’m still young and in high school and this is gunna stick with me for the rest of my life. there was a total lack of respect for the poor man and people were laughing when he jumped.”
- comment left at the SF Examiner
Police and firefighters are well aware of this tendency for crowds to gather and taunt, and this is why they tape off potential suicide scenes and get the crowd out of shouting distance. The risk of a spontaneous cheering section goading a person into killing themselves is high when people in a group feel anonymous and are annoyed or angry. It only takes one person to get the crowd going. Those are the three ingredients – anonymity, group size and arousal. If you lose your sense of self, feel the power of a crowd and then get slammed by a powerful cue from the environment – your individuality may evaporate.
Within a crowd like this many will retain their sense of right and wrong. Some are able to maintain their composure. Many who witnessed these events felt terrible about what happened and condemned those who encouraged the jumpers, going so far as to condemn humanity itself after seeing such a dark display. What they didn’t realize, and what the people yelling didn’t anticipate, was the predictability and regularity of the behavior.
This is going to be hard to believe, but this sort of behavior could be inside you as well. Under the right circumstances, you too might yell “Jump!” To understand why, let’s go shopping for costumes.
Source: Ramon Stoppelenburg
Halloween is a fantastic playground for cultural norms to clash and crack. Costumes and candy, parents and children, the revelry and irreverence directed toward evil and death and hauntings – it is a day to pull back from standards, the rules of proper and normal behavior, and experiment with surrogate selves.
In the United States, Halloween is very popular, with total sales each year around $6 billion. Of that, costumes make up over $2 billion. Across the country, people recede into anonymity and become absorbed by characters who will be shed the next day. Halloween is fun because it feels good to drop the heft of your flesh-and-blood identity from time to time no matter how old you are. The fantasy is something kids wearing clown shoes in pursuit of candy bars and adults shifting aside Guy Fawkes masks to accommodate Jager shots can both appreciate.
Halloween isn’t Mardi Gras or Carnival where just about anything goes, but it is truly the only holiday in the United States where everyone agrees to tilt their heads and let a giant swath of weird things slide. You can pretend to be Don Juan on Valentine’s Day, but you can’t dress like him in public without risking a photo landing on Reddit.
A great costume can draw attention to the garments of individuality you wear every other day simply by replacing them. Halloween gives you an opportunity to play around with the roles, labels and characters we all know are in some ways fabrications, mutually accepted fibs required to get by in a complex social game. The mask you wear to work or to a family reunion or out on a first date is not so much different from the one you wear heading out to plead for Snickers or dance to digital mixtapes.
These shades of self you’ve molded and honed over the years started out awkward and blunt, obvious and tacky. As you approached adolescence you tried on a variety of personae until one fit. You may have pierced body parts or tattooed areas you could cover up when needed. You may have singled out some celebrity or fictional character and cherry picked from their wardrobe, stealing a bit of their magic in the hope you could add it to yours.
Through each season of your life, you sharpen your image and polish your patina until you have a sense of the individual you claim to be.
Still, it’s always fun to role-play and hit reset, and Halloween is one of the few widely accepted times you get to do this in front of everyone you know. In many ways, it is a holiday celebrating anonymity through experimentation with individuality.
It was this muted sense of self which, in the late 1970s, led a group of psychologists to turn Halloween into a controlled study of the human mind.
Arthur Beaman, Edward Diener and Soren Svanum travelled to a nice neighborhood in Seattle, Washington, and picked out 27 homes which would become makeshift laboratories. The researchers wanted to see if the anonymity of Halloween costumes would affect the behavior of children as they gallivanted from secret lab to secret lab.
The researchers placed inside the entrance to each home a bowl of candy, a mirror and a festive Halloween decoration in which a scientist watched through a peephole as children arrived throughout the night. Yes, it was a bit creepy. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a side study into how difficult it would be to hold back the urge to leap out and scream at the children while wearing a labcoat and waving a clipboard.
Source: El Destructo
A woman greeted children throughout the night, and when the tykes presented their trick-or-treat bargains she told them each could have only one piece of candy. She then walked away, leaving them to sort out their tiny moral codes. Half of the time the woman at the door asked the children to say their names and where they lived before leaving them. If the children arrived with adults, they were omitted from the results. The psychologists wondered if the kids would take only one piece thinking there were no adults around to exact punishment or express disappointment in their gluttony. Would they react differently when alone or in groups? Would saying their names remind them of the people behind the masks? Once the kids were primed to remember their identity, or if they saw their reflection in the mirrors, would it remind them of who they were?
In the end, the mirror wasn’t the determining factor. What made the most difference was whether or not they had said their names and whether or not they were alone or in a group.
If they had to say their name and were also alone, less than 10 percent of children cheated. In a group, about 20 percent of those who revealed their identity disobeyed the host. More of the anonymous children stole candy when alone – 20 percent. In a group, close to 60 percent of the anonymous stole the candy. The results suggested the power of their anonymity was magnified in the presence of others. Left unmasked, the cheating rose a bit in a group. With the masks on, it was turbocharged. The kids who felt most anonymous and the most protected by the shared anonymity of the group were also the most likely to break the rules and take more candy. With anonymity set to maximum, many kids tried to take all the candy they could.
This study is one of many which shows your identity can spring a leak in the presence of others, and the more others there are, the more you dissolve into the collective will of the group. Looting, rioting, lynchings, beating, war, chasing a monster with torches – the switch is always there, and it doesn’t take much to flip it.
Psychologists call this phenomenon deindividuation, it’s fun to say and one of the more straightforward terms in the scientific lexicon. In certain situations, you can expect to be de-individualized. Unlike conformity, in which you adopt the ideas and behaviors of others for acceptance and inclusion, deindividuation is mostly unconscious and more likely to lead to mischief. As psychologist David G. Myers said, it is “doing together what you would not do alone.”
Think back to when you got into the most trouble as a teenager, or maybe even beyond those years. Chances are, you were in a group and became seduced by the collective will of your peers. There may have been influencers, instigators or natural leaders, but in the end everyone in your circle probably dissolved into the mind of the unit. When the principal, parent or police asked, “What were you kids thinking?” you had no answer because there wasn’t one. You were just reacting, moving as a herd.
In 1969, psychologist Phillip Zimbardo had female college students deliver painful electric shocks to other female students. Half of the students giving the shocks were randomly selected to wear big hoods and roomy lab coats during the experiment in addition to numbered tags. The other half remained unmasked and wore tags revealing their names. He told the soon-to-be torturers he was studying creativity under stress, and as a woman on the other side of a one-way mirror took a test they were to deliver shocks to see if it affected her performance. The women riding the lightning were actually actors and only pretended to writhe in agony.
Zimbardo made sure the subjects knew it was going to hurt by giving each one a 75-volt sample of pain. In addition, to provide motivation, he had the subjects watch a taped interview with the two test-takers in which one seemed friendly and sweet, but the other was rude and mean.
Zimbardo didn’t tell the girls in either group, masked or unmasked, how often to zap the test takers or for how long. They didn’t have to shock at all if they didn’t want to. They also didn’t talk to each other during the experiment. He wanted to eliminate as best he could obedience to authority and peer pressure. The only factors in play were anonymity and deindividuation. In groups of four, the students sat down and began to torment the test takers.
In each run of the experiment, the women hidden behind hoods and lab coats shocked the test takers twice as often. It didn’t matter if they seemed nice or mean, each actor got just as much juice from the hooded women. The shocks even got more frequent and lasted longer as the test continued. All the while, the actors pretended to be in terrible pain on the other side of the mirror.
The women whose faces could be seen shocked the nice actor less than the unpleasant one, and this according to Zimbardo was the most interesting finding. The deindividuation, the anonymity afforded by the hoods, allowed a terrible behavior usually held back by social norms to run free without any regard for fairness or justice. Without consequences, the excitement of having control over another person fed on itself. As Zimbardo said, the escalation was driven by a positive-feedback loop of arousal. The more they shocked, the more excited they got. The more excited they got, the more often they shocked. Although no one in the experiment refrained from shocking the test-takers, those who weren’t masked made a distinction between the woman who deserved to get her comeuppance and the one who didn’t.
Strangely enough, this same experiment was conducted with Belgian soldiers, and when they wore the hoods they shocked the test-takers less. In their case the uniforms they already wore promoted deindividuation, but the hoods isolated them. Among other soldiers they were part of a unit, a group. Under the hood, they were one person again.
“The banality of evil shares much with the banality of heroism. Neither attribute is the direct consequence of unique dispositional tendencies; there are no special inner attributes of either pathology or goodness residing withing the human psyche or the human genome.”
-Phillip Zimbardo from his book “The Lucifer Effect”
Zimbardo conducted another experiment, and like the Seattle researchers he used the wonderful built-in anonymity of Halloween as a tool. He observed as elementary-school children played games to win tokens which they could turn in at the end to earn prizes. The kids had a choice of games to play. Some games were competitive but non-aggressive while others were one-on-one duels like extracting a beanbag from a tube. The children played these games at a Halloween party both in and out of costume. The teacher told the children the costumes were on their way during the first round, and when they supposedly arrived the kids competed again with their identities concealed. Once the competition was over, the teachers said another class needed the costumes, so they went through the games one more time unmasked. The amount of time the children spent playing the aggressive games, pushing and shoving and yelling, doubled once the costumes were on going from 42 percent to 86 percent. When they came off, it dropped back to 36 percent. When in costume, under the spell of deindividuation, they wanted to go head-to-head and fight even though those games took longer and yielded far fewer tokens. As soon as the costumes were removed, they returned to more civil behavior.
Every time you wade into a crowd or don a concealing garment, you risk deindividuation, and it often brings out the worst in you. When you step back and see yourself as the perpetrator, you act as though your reputation and position in society is at stake. When you have no identity, when you are nameless, faceless and free from retribution, the chains of inhibition fall from your brain.
What hides inside you, held back by inhibition, and how would it manifest if freed? Would you yell for someone to jump to their death while tweeting about it and taking photos? Sitting there now, you think there is no way you could do such a thing, but right now you are an individual with social chains binding both the darkest evil and the brightest good in your heart. You can’t truly predict what would happen if the three ingredients of deindividuation were added to your consciousness – anonymity, group size and arousal.
Source: John Giles/Guardian UK
Super arousal can come from a stirring speech, a mind-melting concert with an intense light show, a dangerous enemy pressing forward on your position or any number of things which get your attention and then won’t let it go. Chanting, singing, dancing and other ritualistic, repetitive group activities are particularly effective at focusing your attention and distracting you from the boundaries of your head and body. Your focus and emotional response builds and builds until the fragile container holding your persona shatters, and not only do your emotions diffuse among the many, but so do your morals and sense of responsibility toward your actions. You no longer feel accountable for your deeds, good or bad, but instead imagine a future in which the group will be praised or blamed for what you did together. It is at this point when you feel fully anonymous. The finely crafted individuality you usually enjoy is suppressed, and the cues from your environment steer you and the others in your group. If you are at Woodstock in 1969, you may feel saturated with love and belonging and come away from the experience with a sense of wonder and joy in addition whatever else you end up putting in your body. If you are at Woodstock in 1999, you may feel enraged and aggressive and come away from the experience with broken ribs and a felony conviction. In each situation, a giant crowd of people followed the natural path to deindividuation. They became super aroused, lost their selves and then went with the cues from their environment.
Deindividuation is usually promoted in any organization where it is important to reduce inhibition and get you to do things you might not do alone. Soldiers and police don uniforms, warriors wear paint, football players wear jerseys, gangs have colors and dances and rituals. Businesses spend millions on team building in an effort to instill a deindividualized sense of worth. Parties thrown by fraternities and sororities have more potential to get out of hand than a party where no one feels absorbed by a group or protected by its norms.
Deindividuation takes away your inhibitions as well as your sense of self and fear of accountability, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The same force which brings otherwise rational people to loot and vandalize and invade Poland can also lead to prosocial behaviors. If you are surrounded by positive cues, deindividuation could lead you to work harder in an exercise class, or pitch in at a homeless shelter, or help build a house. People who forget their sense of self and work together to save a life or search for a missing child show deindividuation is a neutral force of the human will. When 4Chan or Digg or Reddit assemble into an anonymous collective to exact revenge it often ends in actual justice. Once deindividuation kicks in, the cues from the environment shape the resulting behavior. The norms of the mob, good or evil, replace the norms of everyday life.
Robert D. Johnson at Arkansas State and Leslie Downing showed in 1979 how manipulating environmental cues could change the behavior of deindividualized people. Their study was much like Zimbardo’s in which subjects were instructed to shock other people trying to learn a task. In their study, the people delivering the shocks wore either Ku Klux Klan robes or nurse’s uniforms. The subjects in the KKK costumes shocked more than control groups, and those in nurse’s uniforms shocked less. Psychologists Steven Prentiss Dunn and C. B. Spivey showed in a series of studies in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s a deindividualized person could be swayed to donate more money than normal if the cues in their environment were prosocial. The deindividuation which occurs at the Super Bowl, the church sermon, the prison riot and the revolutionary uprising is the same – the behavior which follows is not.
Keep in mind how prone you are to deindividuation and in what situations you are most susceptible to it. Anything from binge drinking to singing Baptist hymns can decrease your awareness of self. Add to this the diffusion of responsibility and anonymity which comes from being within a group, living in a large city, sitting in a darkened room or wearing a mask, and all it takes is a heightened state of arousal for you to become permeable, vulnerable to whatever cues grab your attention.
Know too that chat
rooms, comment threads and message boards are perfect breeding grounds
for deindividuality. The more anonymity a user is allowed, the more
powerful the effect of being protected by the group. The tone and tenor
of the conversations therein and the meatspace ramications of their
collective efforts will reflect the cues provided by the website.
Deindividuation pervades virtual worlds, and the results are mixed. Download “Second Life” and take a stroll. Sooner or later you’ll end up in a sex dungeon. Play any game on Xbox Live, and someone will eventually claim to have carnal knowledge of your mother. You can thank anonymity and deindividuation for both. The comments under a Youtube video may make you weep for the species, but just click over to the entry on the humanzee in Wikipedia for restoration. It is consistent with the world outside the machine. The same force which built and maintained concentration camps also pushed soldiers onto Omaha Beach.
If you want to promote deindividuation for a good cause either in the analog world or a digital one, help people in your group feel safe from judgment and provide prosocial cues. If instead you want to discourage deindividuation in yourself and others, you must eliminate anonymity and avoid dehumanizing labels. The more you feel personal accountability, the more restraint you will show.
If nothing else, remember if you want to throw a badass party where inhibitions fade and hijinks ensue, turn down the lights, turn up the music and, if appropriate, wear costumes.
Links:
Deindividuation of Sports Fans
The Lucifer Effect – Zimbardo’s Research
Trackbacks
- Daily Links for February 10th | Akkam's Razor
- Deindividuation (via You Are Not So Smart) « Alis Anagnostakis
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- Top Posts — WordPress.com
- Simoleon Sense » Blog Archive » Deindividuation: Or why you do stupid things in crowds! (Study of Crowd Behavior, & More)
- How a Hive Mind Mentality Can Make You Capable of Anything Good, Evil, and Bizarre [Dark Side]
- How a Hive Mind Mentality Can Make You Capable of Anything Good, Evil, and Bizarre [Dark Side] | Berry Live
- How a Hive Mind Mentality Can Make You Capable of Anything Good, Evil, and Bizarre [Dark Side] « Sport Gaze
- Weekend Reading: A Day Late Edition « Seeking Delta
- Argument that people are helpless « Later On
- The power of the Hive Mind « Daniel C's Tech Beat
- Linkpost 02-12-11 | Amerika: New Right, Conservationist, Traditionalist, Deep Ecology and Conservative Thought
- Anonymonsters | Signaling Through the Flames
- Crowds will taunt suicidal people to their deaths
- Deindividuation « A sign of things to come …
- Infinite Lives » Daily Linksplosion: Sunday, February 20, 2011
Extremely great post as always! And especially relevant in a time where communities all over the world are more susceptible to these effects because of urbanization and increased internet access.
And I never thought about such mob mentality as working in a positive sense. Extremely informational!
This was a great entry on something that truly chills my blood. I’m curious to know if the Bystander Effect relates to Deindividuation.
Thank you.
There are none of us as cruel as all of us.
I think this is a little too easy. I wear the mask of anonymity (well, relative anonymity) by posting anonymously and I don’t abuse that. I’m getting awfully tired of reading excuses for people who engage in behavior that I would never participate in, and I’m not pretending to be perfect or insusceptible to pressure.
I am invariably part of the “virtuous minority.” We’re the ones who are always criticized for things like being “judgmental” and “politically correct” when we call out bad behavior.
How about some help for us?
The studies and documentaries, and I’ve seen quite a few, don’t address the bullying of the people who do object.
*Stepping away from jeering crowd.*
Totally agreed.
Indeed. There are people who are at least almost always aware of what they’re doing and why they’re doing this. People with strong principles don’t get so much involved in groups. Which is why others watch them suspiciously, because they can’t understand that.
“The studies and documentaries, and I’ve seen quite a few, don’t address the bullying of the people who do object.”
I’d say, quite in the contrary. This mechanism shows *exactly* why these people bullied. The reason is specifically that they are *not* part of the deindividualized crowd. In a sense, they are “outsiders” to the big mass of followers.
“People with strong principles don’t get so much involved in groups.”
I think nobody disagrees with that, especially not these studies. They clearly showed this fact, but on the other hand, they showed how easy it is for people to become individualized. That’s the whole scary point of these studies.
Oops, sorry, that last “individualized” misses a “de” in front :)
Great comment. I certainly feel the same way most of the time. I think we probably all wish the be part of the virtuous minority, and probably assume we will always be part of it no matter what happens, but the scary thing about deindividuation is, according to the research, we all have the potential to dissolve into the collective in the right conditions. Many texts on the subject say the best way to diffuse a crowd like this is to call out one person within it and identify them by name, or ask them to consider something deeply personal which may also be a universal quality. It can cause a cascading effect on everyone to recall they are individuals and break the spell.
Dear David:
I’m sure you’ve read more about this than I have , and I understand that sociologists and psychologists have for decades said it’s wrong to act as if bad behavior is caused just by a “few bad apples,” rather, it’s the behavior of large groups that often is cause of bad conduct.
But maybe it’s time for the experts to look at the “few good apples,” because I am seriously tired of standing up for what’s right even in small situations and being attacked as an overly politically correct bitch. In some situations, you can be labeled a troublemaker, and it can ruin your career. The failure of researchers to fully acknowledge this, at least in the popularized treatments I’ve read and seen, is self-serving.
A reasonably large percentage (35%) of the men in the famous Milgram experiment refused to keep turning the switch even when ordered.
Why didn’t they? What was different about them?
I believe that studies of the kind you are summarizing allow people to shift responsibility from themselves to groups to an even further degree.
Like Scout calling out Mr. Cunningham in “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
I really believe that, rather than being base animals, at our core we are spiritual beings. Those who know who they really are would cry out, “Don’t jump!” Deindividuation is powerful, and a crowd without enlightened leadership is a very dangerous boilerplate for evil.
Reader/Anonymous : Yeah, there are exceptions to every rule, yo. The idea isn’t that EVERYBODY reacts that way, just that there is a demonstrable pattern of people reacting that way. Really, all one needs to do it look at just about any message board/chat room/X-Box live game (LOL at the carnal knowledge but) since the dawn of online communication for verification. I don’t behave that way either (anymore), but in my pre-teens online you better believe I was firing off Internet Tough Guy words left and right.
Phyllis : I think you might be wise to reconsider your view of humanity. There are monsters out there, greater and lesser, many of whom are aware of their evil. They know who they really are, and they choose to continue a life of negative behavior. There are also those who, as you say, don’t know who they really are, and can be swallowed by The Group, and there are those strong enough to stay out. But to assume that to know one’s self is to be good, especially good enough to go against a negative crowd, is a dangerous fallacy.
David : Your blog is great, keep up the awesome work.
Great article, just that. Keep up the good work,
This is actually a really good explanation of Juggalos.
Excellent post. This made me think about a book I read in my philosophy of aesthetics class in college. The book is “The Death & Resurrection Show” by Rogan Taylor, and I think you may find it very interesting. It traces modern day show business back to pre-agricultural shamanistic rituals, explaining that rock concerts may be more connected to our primitive religions than modern day religion is. Many of the tricks used by ancient shamans to move a crowd into a place where they can drop their social status are the same that we experience at music concerts today, and very similar to the theme of this post.
In college, we only had access to the copied pages that our professor passed out. Later, I read the book in its entirety, but it was extremely hard to find (I had to order it from the University of Pitt. and I was in Colorado). However, I did a quick search on Amazon before posting this comment and found it. Here’s the link:
The Death and Resurrection Show
Rogan P. Taylor
I highly recommend this read if you’d like to delve into the shamanistic underpinnings of modern day entertainers like David Bowie and Parliament Funkadelic.
Great article as per usual. I think another thing that effects anonymous morality is the internal dialogue one has with one’s self. If you are someone who is constantly analysing yourself and what your actions say about you, I think you are more likely to catch your self doing things you might later feel bad about. In some ways I think a lack of guilt is akin to a lack of thinking.
I think, really, you proved the misconception as being the truth. The base-ness in us comes out in these situations. At our core, we’re animals and there are certain instinctual drives that are conditioned by social conditioning. Peel those back, ever so slightly, and some of the animal escapes. Social norms and morality seek to condemn that state, so they are “scum”.
Perhaps what wasn’t explored (or maybe it was) were some of the concepts that may motivate some of the behaviours. In the group calling for the jumper to jump, what part did “survival of the fittest” play? Maybe the group subconsciously realised this was a way of getting a perceived weak link out of the gene pool. In Halloween costumes provoking violent play, what part did taking on a new persona play? If the costume was a superhero, for instance, was the child playing a role?
Interesting point. The misconception I was exploring here was the idea mobs are only made of evil people, and there is no way you would ever become part of one. Deindividuation is disinhibiting, like alcohol, and as such it can cause our base desires and behaviors push their way to the surface.
You write: “The tradition is observed around the world now, not just in Western and European countries. From Japan to India to Australia, people recede into anonymity and become absorbed by characters who will be shed the next day.”
In fact Carnival is an ancient tradition that goes back to the Greeks and the festivities in honour of Dionisus and the celebration of spring. These celebrations were much later transfered to the “West” (sic) and they were later mixed with the macabre traditions of the aboriginals in America to finally make the Halloween.
True. I mention Carnival in the article. My point in what you quoted was the modern version of Halloween is also celebrated in other countries. I’ll remove the word “now” to make that more clear. Thanks!
“From Japan to India to Australia, people recede into anonymity and become absorbed by characters who will be shed the next day. ”
India? I think you have your source wrong here. Some urban Indians may have heard of Halloween, but it is as common to India as Holi (an Indian festival) is to the United States. Actually less.
You are correct. It isn’t widely celebrated in India but is growing in popularity among the urban youth. I don’t have first-hand knowledge of this, so I’m willing to remove the reference if more of my Indian readers believe it is too obscure there to include it.
I agree, it is known among the “sophisticated/educated” youth in India, but is really not celebrated on any scale, let alone trick-or-treating.
But then again, Christmas is a really big thing, all kids get excited with the santa claus story and “hanging a star” is as common with many hindu families as christian ones; maybe not as big as diwali or holi but still right there on top..
Funnily enough, my name is also Vinay.
Back to the point, India doesn’t really have Halloween. Diwali is at about the same time, and most of the people get a week or so off and celebrate that. Maybe in the very, very Westernized parts of urban cities (Delhi, Bangalore, etc.), but for the most part it isn’t too prominent.
Well done, David! Very interesting read.
In fact this is true in every society. People tend to get violent when they are in the mass like in protests, that’s how politicians use people against their opponent!
Being part of a group isn’t intrinsically wrong, most of the time deindividuation (or as I like to call it, knocking off the egocentrism) means being polite and falling in line with the social contract. When the group is doing something, the safest place for you to be is going along with them, breaking from that path too often usually gets you thrown into prison. Yeah sometimes this behavior set backfires, but its better overall that humans behave this way.
To be clear I mean like standing in an elevator. You augment the place you stand without really ‘thinking’ about it to make room for more people. Your tapping into the ‘hive mind’ that is telling you that one needs to follow order to help the whole unit more more efficiently. You hear quick steps behind you and you automatically step to the side. I’m not the only person this happens to?
This is my favorite blog post … ever.
It’s exactly what I needed to read tonight. Well done.
Hymns, not hymnals.
Thanks. Fixed.
Quite interesting, but you lose 500 credibility points for suggesting halloween is celebrated in Australia, when in reality, maybe 5-10% of people would do so.
Thanks. I’ll re-word this section. I was trying to suggest it wasn’t ONLY a U.S. thing and people celebrated it in other countries, although not widely. Yours and some other comments lead me to think I didn’t explain myself well. So, I’m changing it now.
It IS increasing in popularity, though.
This would explain soccer riots and other instances of violent crowd behavior. It could also explain the blood lust of audiences in the ancient Roman arenas, where large numbers of animals and humans were regularly slaughtered during the reigns of the emperors. Interestingly, the crowd’s ugly mood could turn in an instant if a gladiator lost, but stood out as having fought bravely. A Roman historian related an incident where an elephant that was being pursued to the death appeared to beg for mercy from the crowd, which immediately began to barrack for its pardon and release.
“My name is Legion. For we are many”…
Fantastic.
Although it may be somewhat contradicted by the Zimbardo experiment involving the Belgian soldiers, I found myself picturing the actions of law enforcement officers such as during the events of the Toronto G20 summit last summer. I wonder what it is that makes humans who don a uniform (i.e. a glorified costume) to take on this persona devoid of accountability and personality; I wondered how these regular every day humans were able to trample, beat, coral, snatch and grab, badmouth and trample fellow humans, who were peacefully demonstrating, or who were not even part of the demonstration at all and were just passing through.
Then the following statement sent chills down my spine:
“Chanting, singing, dancing and other ritualistic, repetitive group activities are
particularly effective at focusing your attention and distracting you from the
boundaries of your head and body. ”
That made me picture how riot police seem to like to rhythmically smash their nightsticks/truncheons on the backs of their shields as they advance towards the crowd. I used to assume that this was some sort of way to get the offending mob’s attention and to intimidate them; to make the officers seem more robotic and menacing (and this is probably what their own superiors tell them.) But now I’m thinking that this practice would also conveniently whip themselves up into a state of deindividuation. By doing so it allows these otherwise ordinary humans to (as you had put it) to act “without any regard for fairness or justice” towards the humans who were demonstrating.
The power of deindividuation also reminds us how easy it is to place agents provacateurs into a crowd of generally civil individuals in order to divert their anger towards acts of wanton destruction and violence in order to subvert the message of the legitimate demonstration. Unfortunately we have proof of such tactics having been used by the police in Canada during a demonstration at the SPP conference in Montebello Quebec in August of 2007. And I doubt that was the first time, nor the last…
Interesting stuff. Before psychology quantified and categorized things like deindividuation people still used and abused natural tendencies and behaviors even if they didn’t have a name for what they were doing. Sometimes an institution can be built around a behavior simply because the construction takes the path of least resistance. Uniforms and arousing chants work, so they become encouraged and institutionalized over time even though the participants don’t know why they work.
That’s almost exactly what I thought of while reading. I am in the states where police brutality is all too common just among the people, not even in riots or protests. They routinely form circles around victims of their beatings and position themselves so that if a person or surveillance camera is around, the act still can not actually be seen and therefore can not be proven, blamed on any individual. It’s unclear to me though whether they do this in cooperation with the group so deindividuation sets in unconsciously, or if they try to intentionally bring on that behavior in order to get away with the violence they already realize excites them.
I believe this may be what often separates the instigators from the cooperators. Perhaps some people already know they have an affinity for violence or mischief and they recognize opportunities to manipulate others when certain situations arise. Maybe the heckling of the suicide jumpers was initiated by a handful of individuals with some urge to see someone die or get hurt, then the other people simply fell into the trap and fueled a fire. So while most might snap out of it and be ashamed of their behavior, isn’t it possible that others just walk away entertained/satisfied? These kind of sociopaths terrify me but I don’t doubt their existence.
It’d be interesting to do studies like those cited with taking into account tendencies of the subjects (some with histories of violent crime or other sociopathic behaviors, others with histories of philanthropy, etc).
Another reason they could beat on their shields is for solidarity: not only are you building confidence in both your stick and your shield, but you hear the beating of all the people working with you.
Seriously, imagine staring down an angry mob that is deindividuated and negative enough to EXTREMELY POSSIBLY murder you for getting in its way. The difference between turning tail and doing your job could be confidence that you have a nice big group on your own side.
Seeing as how much that electrocution experiment is publicized, people will know when such situations arise and will avoid deindividuation anyway even in an ideal situation. A decent example would be this:
A group of people decided to believe that Jesus was on Saturn and they can reach him via suicide. Later it turns out they were just crazy, people hear about it and even if subject to similar groups will know better and avoid them.
I wonder what Teilhard de Chardin might have said to all of this, other than how it maybe does show as the sci fi author often remind us, that we are not yet quite ready to take on any ‘higher’ noospheric consciousness.
I also wonder if the “Jump!” phenomenon has been studied to see if perhaps predominantly it works as a reverse-psychology and wakes the jumper into asserting their individuality, a behavioural “screw you jack” by stepping back into the office. Could it be an adaptive behaviour that most often works, but like most treatments, has some spectacular failures? After all, if crowd-chided jumps were so common, wouldn’t the media have tired of reporting them years ago? Instead it seems the opposite, that the failure of the method is the more news-worthy (it also tickles our post-literate risk-aversion obsession)
Great article.
Question: could the individuals, who just dethroned the old Egyptian regime, have done it without a degree of group anonymity?
All the factors apply: fear of violating social norms (as imposed by a police state); bravado and law breaking – required to face down the normal and secret police… and so on.
I think it played a significant role. As the article suggests, deindividuation it is neither good or bad, but the behavior which follows can be either.
great article. im always a fan of some funny retoric. i will definantly check back here
My first instinct whenever I read a blog on human behavior is to re-examine my behavior and see where my alleged free will succumbs to conditioned response and why. We would love to believe that we are never on automatic pilot (good deeds and pure thoughts seem to get a pass and aren’t challenged by critical thinking). As always a thought provoking post.
Linked at Photon Courier
We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.
–Bolshevik Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko
Execute mercilessly.
–Lev Trotsky´s telegram to comrades in Astrakhan´, March 1919
the Bolsheviks must to “put an end once and for all of the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life,” Trotsky proclaimed.
…and the great Socialist salvation marches on.
What’s funny about this, besides that it’s a GREAT post (as always), is that I immediately recognized the false suicide jumper from Improv Everywhere (the first picture). T’was just to mention this.
The Interwebs are small, my dear fellas.
I enjoyed reading this very much! Excellent read.
I felt like this post was all over the place. It couldn’t decide if it was crowd psychology or disinhibition from dissociative anonymity. Examination of the latter specifically contained many cases that had nothing to do with crowd dynamics at all, unless you assume that people behave identically alone and in groups – but that would undermine the entire thesis. If the first 2/3 were a little less… schizophrenic before finally converging into a unified theme, it would have been a much more pleasant read.
I don’t buy the idea that I’m subject to deindividuation just because many or even most people are, but then again I’m kind of a space alien; if you’re too inherently socially inept care what other people think to begin with, you don’t change when you’re anonymous.
Character is what you are in the dark…
really a excellent article.i will come back often.
Very interesting, David. Of course I knew about Zimbardo and his one famous experiment but didn’t know about his other experiments and similar ones. I thought you might touch on the 1992 LA riots.
This sort of thing should be part of Life 101, something everyone should study.
In China, where I’m currently living, you feel things like this as there is just so many people and you feel like an element in the mass. You feel compelled to join a crowd to push into a bus as sometimes there is no line and you feel like just a part of the mass. People who don’t push and shove literally get left behind. At the same time, no one is bothered by the pushing. It is expected.
Thanks for the article!