Bonus Reading 4.

1
Doing Together What We Would Not
Do Alone

Source: Module 19 (pages 209-215) of Myers, D. G. (2012).

Exploring social psychology (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Social Psychology
Professor Scott Plous
Wesleyan University

Note: This reading material is being provided free of charge to Coursera

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 MODULE

19 ❖

Doing Together What We

Would Not Do Alone

I
n April 2003, in the wake of American troops entering Iraq’s cities,
looters—”liberated” from the scrutiny of Saddam Hussein’s police—
ran rampant. Hospitals lost beds. The National Library lost tens of
thousands of old manuscripts and lay in smoldering ruins. Universities
lost computers, chairs, even lightbulbs. The National Museum in Baghdad
had 15,000 objects stolen—most of what had not previously been removed
to safekeeping (Burns, 2003a, 2003b; Lawler, 2003; Polk & Schuster, 2005).
“Not since the Spanish conquistadors ravaged the Aztec and Inca cul-
tures has so much been lost so quickly,” reported Science (Lawler, 2003a).
“They came in mobs: A group of 50 would come, then would go, and
another would come,” explained one university dean (Lawler, 2003b).
Such reports had the rest of the world wondering: What happened to
the looters’ sense of morality? Why did such behavior erupt? And why
was it not anticipated?

DEINDIVIDUATION
Social facilitation experiments show that groups can arouse people, and
social loafing experiments show that groups can diffuse responsibility.
When arousal and diffused responsibility combine and normal inhibi-
tions diminish, the results may be startling. People may commit acts that
range from a mild lessening of restraint (throwing food in the dining
hall, snarling at a referee, screaming during a rock concert) to impulsive
self-gratification (group vandalism, orgies, thefts) to destructive social
explosions (police brutality, riots, lynchings).

209
210 PART THREE SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Apparently acting without their normal conscience,

people looted Iraqi institutions after the toppling of
Saddam Hussein’s regime.

These unrestrained behaviors have something in common: They are

somehow provoked by the power of a group. Groups can generate a
sense of excitement, of being caught up in something bigger than one’s
self. It is harder to imagine a single rock fan screaming deliriously at a
private rock concert, or a single police officer beating a defenseless
offender or suspect. In group situations, people are more likely to aban-
don normal restraints, to lose their sense of individual identity, to become
responsive to group or crowd norms—in a word, to become what Leon
Festinger, Albert Pepitone, and Theodore Newcomb (1952) labeled
deindividuated. What circumstances elicit this psychological state?

Group Size
A group has the power not only to arouse its members but also to render
them unidentifiable. The snarling crowd hides the snarling basketball
fan. A lynch mob enables its members to believe they will not be pros-
ecuted; they perceive the action as the group’s. Looters, made faceless by
the mob, are freed to loot. In an analysis of 21 instances in which crowds
MODULE 19 DOING TOGETHER WHAT WE WOULD NOT DO ALONE 211

were present as someone threatened to jump from a building or a bridge,

Leon Mann (1981) found that when the crowd was small and exposed
by daylight, people usually did not try to bait the person with cries of
“Jump!” But when a large crowd or the cover of night gave people ano-
nymity, the crowd usually did bait and jeer.
Brian Mullen (1986) reported a similar effect associated with lynch
mobs: The bigger the mob, the more its members lose self-awareness and
become willing to commit atrocities, such as burning, lacerating, or dis-
membering the victim.
In each of these examples, from sports crowds to lynch mobs, eval-
uation apprehension plummets. People’s attention is focused on the
situation, not on themselves. And because “everyone is doing it,” all can
attribute their behavior to the situation rather than to their own choices.

Physical Anonymity
How can we be sure that the effect of crowds means greater anonym-
ity? We can’t. But we can experiment with anonymity to see if it actu-
ally lessens inhibitions. Philip Zimbardo (1970, 2002) got the idea for
such an experiment from his undergraduate students, who questioned
how good boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies could so suddenly
become monsters after painting their faces. To experiment with such
anonymity, he dressed New York University women in identical white
coats and hoods, rather like Ku Klux Klan members (Figure 19-1).

FIGURE 19-1
In Philip Zimbardo’s deindividuation research, anonymous women delivered
more shock to helpless victims than did identifiable women.
212 PART THREE SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Asked to deliver electric shocks to a woman, they pressed the shock

button twice as long as did women who were unconcealed and wearing
large name tags.
The Internet offers similar anonymity. Millions of those who were
aghast at the looting by the Baghdad mobs were on those very days
anonymously pirating music tracks using file-sharing software. With so
many doing it, and with so little concern about being caught, download-
ing someone’s copyright-protected property and then offloading it to an
MP3 player just didn’t seem terribly immoral.
In several recent cases on the Internet, anonymous online bystanders
have egged on people threatening suicide, sometimes with live video
feeding the scene to scores of people. Online communities “are like the
crowd outside the building with the guy on the ledge,” noted an analyst
of technology’s social effects, Jeffrey Cole. Sometimes a caring person
tried to talk the person down, while others, in effect, chanted, “Jump,
jump.” “The anonymous nature of these communities only emboldens
the meanness or callousness of the people on these sites,” Cole adds
(quoted by Stelter, 2008).
Testing deindividuation on the streets, Patricia Ellison, John Govern,
and their colleagues (1995) had a confederate driver stop at a red light
and wait for 12 seconds whenever she was followed by a convertible or
a 4 3 4 vehicle. While enduring the wait, she recorded any horn-honking
(a mildly aggressive act) by the car behind. Compared with drivers of
convertibles and 4 3 4s with the car tops down, those who were relatively
anonymous (with the tops up) honked one-third sooner, twice as often,
and for nearly twice as long.
A research team led by Ed Diener (1976) cleverly demonstrated the
effect both of being in a group and of being physically anonymous. At
Halloween, they observed 1,352 Seattle children trick-or-treating. As the
children, either alone or in groups, approached 1 of 27 homes scattered
throughout the city, an experimenter greeted them warmly, invited them
to “take one of the candies,” and then left the candy unattended. Hidden
observers noted that children in groups were more than twice as likely to
take extra candy as solo children. Also, children who had been asked their
names and where they lived were less than half as likely to transgress as
those who were left anonymous. As Figure 19-2 shows, the transgression
rate varied dramatically with the situation. When they were deindividu-
ated both by group immersion and by anonymity, most children stole
extra candy.
Those studies make me wonder about the effect of wearing uni-
forms. Preparing for battle, warriors in some tribal cultures (like rabid
fans of some sports teams) depersonalize themselves with body and
face paints or special masks. After the battle, some cultures kill, torture,
or mutilate any remaining enemies; other cultures take prisoners alive.
MODULE 19 DOING TOGETHER WHAT WE WOULD NOT DO ALONE 213

Percent transgressing
60
Identified
50 Anonymous

40

30

20

10

0
Alone In groups

FIGURE 19-2
Children were more likely to transgress by taking extra Halloween candy
when in a group, when anonymous, and, especially, when deindividuated by
the combination of group immersion and anonymity. Source: Data from Diener
& others, 1976.

Robert Watson (1973) scrutinized anthropological files and discovered

this: The cultures with depersonalized warriors were also the cultures
that brutalized their enemies. In Northern Ireland, 206 of 500 violent
attacks studied by Andrew Silke (2003) were conducted by attackers
who wore masks, hoods, or other face disguises. Compared with undis-
guised attackers, these anonymous attackers inflicted more serious inju-
ries, attacked more people, and committed more vandalism.
Does becoming physically anonymous always unleash our worst
impulses? Fortunately, no. In all these situations, people were respond-
ing to clear antisocial cues. Robert Johnson and Leslie Downing (1979)
point out that the Klan-like outfits worn by Zimbardo’s participants may
have been stimulus cues for hostility. In an experiment at the University
of Georgia, women put on nurses’ uniforms before deciding how much
shock someone should receive. When those wearing the nurses’ uni-
forms were made anonymous, they became less aggressive in adminis-
tering shocks than when their names and personal identities were
stressed. From their analysis of 60 deindividuation studies, Tom Postmes
and Russell Spears (1998; Reicher & others, 1995) concluded that being
anonymous makes one less self-conscious, more group-conscious, and
more responsive to cues present in the situation, whether negative (Klan
uniforms) or positive (nurses’ uniforms).
214 PART THREE SOCIAL INFLUENCE

Arousing and Distracting Activities

Aggressive outbursts by large groups often are preceded by minor
actions that arouse and divert people’s attention. Group shouting, chant-
ing, clapping, or dancing serve both to hype people up and to reduce
self-consciousness. One observer of a Unification Church ritual recalls
how the “choo-choo” chant helped deindividuate:

All the brothers and sisters joined hands and chanted with increasing
intensity, choo-choo-choo, Choo-choo-choo, CHOO-CHOO-CHOO! YEA!
YEA! POWW!!! The act made us a group, as though in some strange way
we had all experienced something important together. The power of the
choo-choo frightened me, but it made me feel more comfortable and there
was something very relaxing about building up the energy and releasing
it. (Zimbardo & others, 1977, p. 186)

Ed Diener’s experiments (1976, 1979) have shown that activities such

as throwing rocks and group singing can set the stage for more disin-
hibited behavior. There is a self-reinforcing pleasure in acting impul-
sively while observing others doing likewise. When we see others act as
we are acting, we think they feel as we do, which reinforces our own
feelings (Orive, 1984). Moreover, impulsive group action absorbs our
attention. When we yell at the referee, we are not thinking about our
values; we are reacting to the immediate situation. Later, when we stop
to think about what we have done or said, we sometimes feel chagrined.
Sometimes. At other times we seek deindividuating group experiences—
dances, worship experiences, group encounters—where we can enjoy
intense positive feelings and closeness to others.

DIMINISHED SELF-AWARENESS
Group experiences that diminish self-consciousness tend to disconnect
behavior from attitudes. Research by Ed Diener (1980) and Steven Pren-
tice-Dunn and Ronald Rogers (1980, 1989) revealed that unself-conscious,
deindividuated people are less restrained, less self-regulated, more likely
to act without thinking about their own values, and more responsive to
the situation. Those findings complement and reinforce the experiments
on self-awareness.
Self-awareness is the opposite of deindividuation. Those made self-
aware, by acting in front of a mirror or a TV camera, exhibit increased
self-control, and their actions more clearly reflect their attitudes. In front
of a mirror, people taste-testing cream cheese varieties eat less of the
high-fat variety (Sentyrz & Bushman, 1998).
People made self-aware are also less likely to cheat (Beaman & others,
1979; Diener & Wallbom, 1976). So are those who generally have a strong
 MODULE 19 DOING TOGETHER WHAT WE WOULD NOT DO ALONE 215

sense of themselves as distinct and independent (Nadler & others, 1982).

In Japan, where (mirror or no mirror) people more often imagine how
they might look to others, people are no more likely to cheat when not
in front of a mirror (Heine & others, 2008). The principle: People who are
self-conscious, or who are temporarily made so, exhibit greater consis-
tency between their words outside a situation and their deeds in it.
We can apply those findings to many situations in everyday life.
Circumstances that decrease self-awareness, as alcohol consumption
does, increase deindividuation (Hull & others, 1983). Deindividuation
decreases in circumstances that increase self-awareness: mirrors and
cameras, small towns, bright lights, large name tags, undistracted quiet,
individual clothes and houses (Ickes & others, 1978). When a teenager
leaves for a party, a parent’s parting advice could well be “Have fun,
and remember who you are.” In other words, enjoy being with the
group, but be self-aware; maintain your personal identity; be wary of
deindividuation.

C
ONCEPT TO REMEMBER
deindividuation Loss of self-
awareness and evaluation
apprehension; occurs in group
situations that foster respon-
siveness to group norms, good
or bad.