deindividuation AO3

• + Douglas and Mcgarty looked at aggressive online behaviour in chat rooms and uses of instant messaging. Strong correlation between anonymity and flaming. Most aggressive cases by anonymous. supports link between aggression and anonymity, a key element of deindividuation.
• -- contradictory evidence. Gergen et al's in the dark study, groups of 8 strangers were put in a completely dark room for 1 hour. In this, the amount of touching and kissing was much lower, thus showing deindividuation does not always lead to aggression.
• + deindividuation can explain the aggressive behaviour of baiting crowds. Leon Mann investigated instances of suicidal jumpers. He identified 21 cases reported in US newspapers of a crowd gathering to bait a jumper. i.e. to encourage him or her to jump. These incidents tended to occur in darkness. The crowds were large and the jumpers were relatively distant from the crowd. Therefore, there is some validity to the idea that a large group can become aggressive in a deindividuated, faceless crowd.
• Deindividuation highlights factors related to nurture in aggressive behaviour. These include anything that reduces private and public self-awareness. People who would not usually behave aggressively do so in part of a crowd, for example at a football match. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is online behaviour like social media. However, we have seen that nature plays an important role in causing aggressive behaviour. These causes are genetic, ethological and evolutionary. This approach suggests that people are aggressive in crowds, perhaps because the situation makes them feel stressed.
• -- de-individuated behaviour is normative rather than anti-normative. De-individuation argues we behave in ways that are contrary to social norms. However in their SIDE model Russell Spears and Martin Lee argue that de-individuation actually leads to behavior that conforms to group norms. These may be antisocial norms, but could be prosocial norms. This happens because anonymity shifts an individual's attention from his or her private identity to their group identity as a group member. This suggests that people in a de-individuated state remain sensitive to norms rather than ignoring them.