deindividuation

• Deindividuation is a process whereby people lose their sense of socialised individual identity and engage in unsocialised, often antisocial behaviour.
•  Being part of a crowd can diminish awareness of individuality. This is because in a large crowd the individual feels anonymous and does not therefore feel a sense of responsibility. Responsibility is shared by the group, and therefore we experience less personal guilt at harmful aggression directed at others.
• Zimbardo distinguished between individuated and deindividuated states:

  Individuated - rational and normative behaviour

  Deindividuated - emotional; impulsive; irrational. In this state we lose our self awareness; stop monitoring and regulating our behaviour and ignore social norms.
• Conditions which promote deindividuated aggressive behaviour:

  darkness, drugs, alcohol, uniforms, masks, disguises. Anonymity provides fewer opportunities for others to judge.
• Self-awareness - attention to own feelings and behaviour, reduced in crowds
• Public self-awareness - care about what others think, reduced in crowds.
• Dodd (1985) conducted research into deindividuation. 229 undergraduate psychology students were asked ‘if you could do anything, no repercussions, what would you do?’ responses were anonymous. 36% said some form of antisocial behaviour, 26% said they’d commit a crime. Only 9% were prosocial responses
• Douglas and McGarty looked at levels of aggression in online chatrooms. They found a strong correlation between making threatening comments whilst remaining anonymous. The most aggressive comments were sent by those who did not reveal their identity
• Gergen demonstrated that not all deindividuation leads to aggression. Their ‘deviance in the dark’ study showed that strangers who were in the dark with no rules (deindividuated) did not act aggressively towards one another. Instead they behaved more intimately.
• Johnson and Downing (1979) study where female pps gave fake electric shocks to confederates in a uniform compared to wearing their own clothes. Pps wearing a KKK outfit gave more and more intense shocks, whereas those dressed as nurses gave fewer and less intense shocks and were more likely to be compassionate towards the confederate. Both aggression and prosocial behaviour are potential outcomes of deindividuation
• Understanding deindividuation can help us understand aggressive behaviour in online gaming services, which have many features to promote a psychological state of deindividuation. There is a reduction of personal identity as players use handles to identity themselves. Game playing is arousing and immersive and there is the presence of a crowd in the form of the audience. Deindividuation can be used to improve such services and reduce aggression