The following excerpts are from an article by David McRaney on the concept of deindivduation, or the concept of doing anonymously in a group what you would ordinarily not even consider. After recent events in the news, it seemed like a good time to discuss how we think about riotous behavior and how closely related it is to problems here at home… 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 prone to losing your individuality and becoming absorbed into a hivemind under the right conditions.
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…
…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…
…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…
…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…
…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…
The results*: Children who were…
Alone and had to say their name… less than 10% disobeyed the rules (took more candy)
In a group and had to say their name… about 20% disobeyed the rules
Alone and anonymous… a little more than 20% disobeyed
In a group and anonymous… nearly 60% disobeyed
…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.”
*I compiled the chart of results based on the article. You may see the full article here.
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