Deindividuation is a psychological state in which people lose their sense of individual identity and personal responsibility while immersed in a group, crowd, or anonymity.
Normal checks on behavior, such as guilt and fear of judgment, weaken, so conduct follows the group’s norms. It explains why people often act more recklessly in a crowd than alone.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Deindividuation is a state in which you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility. An individual relinquishes individual responsibility for actions and sees behavior as a consequence of group norms and expectations.
- Le Bon: Le Bon was the first to recognize how individuals’ behavior changed in a crowd.
- Anonymity: Anonymity leads to loss of internal restraints, self-identity, and responsibility for our behavior. Conditions that increase anonymity serve to minimize concerns about evaluation by others and weaken normal controls based on guilt, shame, or fear.
- Diffusion of Responsibility: Diffusion of responsibility leads to less feelings of personal guilt when committing aggressive acts.
- Self-Awareness: Prentice-Dunn et al. (1982) suggested it was a reduced self-awareness rather than simply anonymity that leads to de-individuation. They distinguished public self-awareness (concern about being judged) from private (attention to one’s own values).
- SIDE Model: Reicher, Spears, and Postmes (1995) argue that anonymity makes group identity more salient. People then follow their group’s norms rather than losing themselves.
- Evidence: Postmes and Spears’ (1998) meta-analysis found little support for a deindividuated state. People did follow locally salient norms.
Definition and Historical Background
Deindividuation is a process where people lose their sense of socialized individual identity and resort to unsocialized and anti-social behavior.
Deindividuation is a state of decreased self-evaluation in a crowd and is one of the most widely cited effects of social groups (Postmes and Spears, 1998).
Deindividuation is characterized by a lower awareness of the self and one’s individuality. This may result in anti-normative and disinhibited behavior, “what forces crowd members at times to behave in uncivilized and violent ways (Diener, 1976).
Classical Theories
Gustave Le Bon’s crowd theory provides the basis for deindividuation (Postmes, 2001). In The Crowd, Le Bon proposes that anonymity, suggestibility, and contagion can turn groups of people into so-called “psychological crowds.”
The collective mind of the crowd takes over the individual’s. Individual members become “irrational, fickle, and suggestible” (Postmes, 2001) and, as a result, become controlled by the crowd’s leader, capable of anti-normative acts.
Le Bon’s theory of The Crowd came to influence many theories of collective behavior, such as those of Freud, McDougall, Blumer, and Allport.
The 1950s brought a resurgence in popularity for Le Bon’s idea.
Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb (1952) coined the term “deindividuation.” They turned Le Bon’s crowd theory into a testable proposition.
Individuals are not “seen or paid attention to as individuals,” and “under conditions where the member is not individuated in the group, there is likely to occur of the member a reduction of inner restraints against doing various things.”
Early theorists, such as Festinger (1952), believed deindividuation occurred when a group did not treat members as individuals. Individuals felt unaccountable.
This unaccountability leads to a reduction in inner restraint, increasing behavior that would normally be inhibited. Like Le Bon, Festinger defined deindividuation as a loss of individuality through submergence in a crowd. The mind stayed intact.
However, to Festinger, this individuality is not replaced by the collective mind. Rather, deindividuation simply releases an individual from their normal moral restraints (Postmes and Spears, 1998).
Philip Zimbardo’s Approach to Deindividuation
Zimbardo did not see deindividuation as solely a group phenomenon, applying deindividualization as broadly as suicide, murder, and hostility in relationships (Postmes and Spears, 1998).
Although he studied anti-social behavior, Zimbardo stressed that deindividuated acts could be prosocial.
Minimal self-observation and concern for social evaluation, he argued, weaken controls based on guilt, shame, fear, and commitment (Zimbardo, 1969).
Several conditions can trigger this:
- Anonymity: others cannot identify the person.
- Diffused responsibility: accountability is spread across the group.
- An overloading environment: arousing or sensory-overloading surroundings.
- Unfamiliar situations: unstructured or unfamiliar settings.
- Drugs or alcohol: altered states that reduce self-monitoring.
The result is often impulsive, over-the-top behavior.
Zimbardo’s 1969 Shock Study
Zimbardo adapted the shock paradigm from Milgram’s obedience studies to test anonymity directly. Each participant first felt a mild 75-volt shock herself. The “victim” was a confederate who received no real shocks but appeared increasingly distressed over twenty trials.
- Aim: Zimbardo tested whether hiding a person’s identity would increase their willingness to hurt someone else, and how people react to information about the victim.
- Method: Female volunteers, told the study concerned “creativity under stress,” shocked another student whenever a light signaled a wrong answer. Hooded participants hid their faces and were addressed only in groups; individuated participants wore name badges.
- Results: Hooded participants delivered roughly twice as much shock as individuated ones, and durations rose across trials. When told the victim was likeable, individuated participants eased off but hooded ones did not adjust.
- Conclusion: Anonymity releases aggression and disconnects it from moral judgment of the victim, since hiding identity strips away cues that would normally restrain cruelty.
A similar design featured in Zimbardo’s later Stanford Prison Experiment, where guards wore uniforms and mirrored sunglasses.
A separate replication using Belgian soldiers found the opposite pattern.
Hooded soldiers grew self-conscious, suspicious, and anxious rather than aggressive, while uniformed soldiers kept their usual baseline anonymity (Zimbardo, 1969). Concealment alone does not guarantee a single, predictable response.
Diener’s Field Studies: The Halloween Effect
Edward Diener argued that earlier studies found inconsistent support for deindividuation because they ignored the individual psychological changes involved (Diener, 1980).
One early test, Diener, Westford, Dineen, and Fraser (1973), had participants hit a non-responsive “pacifist” actor.
Results were inconsistent. Isolated individuals sometimes showed more aggression than groups did (Postmes and Spears, 1998).
Diener, Fraser, Beaman, and Kelem (1976) moved the test outdoors. They used an everyday ritual, not a lab task.
- Aim: They tested whether anonymity and group membership increase spontaneous stealing among ordinary trick-or-treaters.
- Method: Over 700 trick-or-treaters met bowls of sweets marked “take one” on Halloween night. Homeowners either asked each child’s name first (non-anonymous) or said they could not tell who the child was (anonymous).
- Results: The measure was taking more than one sweet. Stealing rates varied sharply by condition, as the table shows.
| Condition | % Who Stole Extra |
|---|---|
| Anonymous and in a group | 57% |
| Anonymous and alone | 21% |
| Non-anonymous and in a group | 21% |
| Non-anonymous and alone | 8% |
- Conclusion: Anonymity and group membership each raised stealing on their own. Children who were both unidentifiable and grouped stole at nearly seven times the rate of identifiable children acting alone.
However, the field setting made self-awareness itself almost impossible to measure directly. Later theorists tried to close that gap.
Prentice-Dunn and Rogers (1982) picked up the gap directly.
Participants played a video game they believed could shock an opponent.
One group sat in a dim, loud room and was encouraged to talk, drawing attention outward.
Another played a calmer game in a quiet, well-lit room.
The dim, loud group showed higher aggression, consistent with reduced private self-awareness (Postmes, 2001), a distinction explored fully next.
Criticism and Reconceptualization
Historically, evaluating the research relating to deindividuation has been difficult, as the definition of deindividuation has evolved rapidly. Researchers have seen deindividuation theory as neglecting how crowd behavior may be the product of local group norms.
As late as the 1970s, deindividuation was a focus of psychological research, but there remained little empirical support for deindividuation theory. The theory needed revision.
The evidence supporting deindividuation driven by anonymity was inconsistent, and there remained no evidence for the state of deindividuation itself (Diener, 1980).
As a result, the next decade saw a reconceptualization of deindividuation theory. Diener changed the question. He argued that the defining feature was not anonymity itself but reduced self-awareness.
Self-awareness means how far a person attends to their own standards and values rather than the immediate environment. Anonymity and group size mattered only if they pulled attention away from the self. The mechanism moved inside the person.
According to Le Bon, collective behavior is always irrational, and individuals in the crowd lose their intellectual control.
However, sociologists beyond Le Bon found that crowds can actually encourage norms for restraint and orderly behavior (Turner and Killian, 1972).
Theorists postulated that group behavior was a consequence of local group norms rather than the anonymization of individuals within groups. Empirical tests soon followed.
Johnson and Downing (1979) tested this hypothesis. They recreated Zimbardo’s original experiment and dressed participants in uniforms similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan or nurses.
Those dressed as Ku Klux Klan members shocked actors more, and those dressed as nurses shocked actors less than the control group. Thus, this research supports the idea that those in groups are sensitive to and highly influenced by normative cues.
Johnson and Downing also noted a problem with the hood. Zimbardo’s costume resembled Ku Klux Klan robes.
That association, not anonymity itself, may have acted as a demand characteristic: a cue telling participants what behavior is expected.
Nurses’ uniforms were just as anonymous as the hoods. Yet nurses delivered less shock than a control group whose names and identities were emphasized. The message carried by the disguise mattered more than the concealment.
Prentice-Dunn et al. (1982) suggested it was a reduced self awareness rather than simply anonymity that leads to de-individuation. They proposed two types of self-awareness.
Public self-awareness
The individual’s concern about the impression presented to other people, knowing that they will be evaluated. This is reduced by being in a crowd, diffusion of responsibility, anonymity, and role models within the group, which set the social norms. The audience effectively disappears.
Loss of public awareness leads to loss of public standards of behavior or a lowering of inhibitions. If an individual is self-focused, they act according to their own values, so aggressive behavior is less likely.
Private self-awareness
Concern individuals have for their own thoughts and feelings. This is reduced by becoming so involved with group activities that individuals “forget” themselves.
Loss of private awareness leads to a loss of internal standards and an over-reliance on environmental cues. If a person is focused on the group, private self-awareness decreases further. The internal brakes loosen, so aggressive behavior becomes more likely.
Postmes and Spears’ Meta-Analysis
Postmes and Spears’ (1998) meta-analysis, Deindividuation and Antinormative Behavior, found little support for deindividuated, antinormative behavior or for the existence of a deindividuated state.
However, the analysis showed something else: groups and individuals conformed more closely to norms specific to their situation while “deindividuated.” That distinction mattered.
Postmes and Spears’ result is essentially what the social identity model (SIDE), introduced below, predicts. It was drawn from decades of accumulated data, not one experiment.
It also marks a clear turning point. The field moved away from the original picture of deindividuation as a release of primitive impulses.
Differential Self-Awareness Theory
Prentice-Dunn and Rogers (1982) built on this by extending the theory into what they called “differential self-awareness theory.” The theory holds that different cues lower different kinds of self-awareness. Two cue types disinhibit behavior.
“Accountability cues,” such as anonymity and diffusion of responsibility, decrease public self-awareness. Crowd members then worry less about being evaluated. They expect no negative consequences for their behavior.
Conversely, “attentional cues,” such as group cohesiveness and physiological arousal, draw attention away from oneself, reducing self-regulation and attention to personal standards of behavior.
Both cue types can produce antinormative, disinhibited behavior, but Prentice-Dunn and Rogers (1982) held that only reduced private self-awareness leads to genuinely deindividuated behavior.
Social Identity Theory’s Explanation of Deindividuation
The definition of deindividuation shifted markedly over time.
Early theorists such as Festinger et al. (1952) linked it to not being scrutinized or held accountable in a group.
Zimbardo (1969) later defined the inputs and effects of deindividuation more fully.
He expanded the causes from sole anonymity to contextual factors such as reduced responsibility, arousal, sensory overload, unpredictability, and drugs or alcohol.
Zimbardo (1969) extended Festinger’s theory of deindividuation to create a theoretical framework specifying the variables leading to deindividuation and output behavior.
Zimbardo characterized the resulting behavior as emotional, impulsive, irrational, and “in violation of established norms of appropriateness.”
Diener went further still, arguing that reduced self-awareness, not mere anonymity, was deindividuation’s defining feature.
Prentice-Dunn and Rogers (1982) later split the causes in two. Accountability cues lower public self-awareness. Attentional cues lower private self-awareness, and only those produce deindividuation proper.
The Social Identity Model (SIDE)
Social identity theorists, who focus on the part of the self-concept that comes from group membership, argue that deindividuation does not cause a loss of self.
Instead, it shifts identity from an individual to a member of a crowd.
For example, the shared identity of a group of protestors can unite demonstrators who otherwise disagree strongly. The shift is not random.
Conversely, the whole group may revolt if another group, such as the police, treats it as one undifferentiated mass (Reicher et al., 1995).
Reicher (1984) tested this idea in a real riot, the 1980 disorder in the St Paul’s district of Bristol.
- Aim: Reicher tested whether the disorder showed the unstructured loss of control that classic crowd theory predicts, or followed recognizable social norms and group boundaries.
- Method: He analyzed police, media, and participant accounts as a naturally occurring case study. He reconstructed who the crowd attacked, who it spared, and how this shifted over time.
- Results: The crowd targeted symbols of financial and state power, such as banks and police, and largely spared local businesses. When one member threw a brick at a bus, others did not follow, and some intervened.
- Conclusion: The riot was intergroup behavior governed by shared understandings of legitimate targets, not a release of primitive impulses. Being in the crowd shifted which identity was active.
Such selectivity is hard to reconcile with crowds spreading disorder through unconstrained contagion.
The most influential version of this view is the social identity model of deindividuation effects, or SIDE. SIDE names this pattern.
SIDE argues that anonymity, group cohesiveness, and immersion reinforce group salience and conformity to group norms rather than erasing identity altogether (Postmes and Spears, 1998).
It predicts conformity to the norms of the specific group involved, not to general standards of conduct.
The SIDE model can explain the outcomes of several deindividuation experiments.
SIDE Applied: Reinterpreting Classic Findings
SIDE can reframe earlier findings in identity terms.
Playing video games in a dark room with loud rock music, for example, produced more aggressive behavior. This may reflect participants believing aggression was expected and consistent with their group identity in that situation (Postmes and Spears, 1998).
Placing participants in front of a mirror, by contrast, focuses attention on individual identity rather than the group (Froming, Walker, and Lopyan, 1982; Postmes and Spears, 1998). Context shapes the outcome.
Awareness of one’s own individuality can also change how a person reads the group’s norms.
In Froming et al. (1982), the study where participants shocked actors, those low in private self-awareness shocked more when they believed others favored shocking more. They shocked less when they believed others favored shocking less.
Comparing the Theories of Deindividuation
Deindividuation theory has been refined rather than refuted. The four main accounts increasingly look like answers to different questions.
| Account | Core claim | Main strength | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classic (Le Bon, Festinger, Zimbardo) | Anonymity and group immersion release primitive impulses. | Anonymity reliably changes behavior, as the shock and Halloween studies show. | Does not explain why; the hood and Belgian-soldier findings show context matters. |
| Self-awareness (Diener; Prentice-Dunn and Rogers) | Reduced private self-awareness, not anonymity itself, drives disinhibition. | Names a testable psychological mediator. | The inner state is inferred from behavior rather than measured. |
| Social identity (Reicher; SIDE) | Anonymity makes group identity salient, so people follow that group’s norms. | Explains organized, norm-governed crowds such as the St Paul’s riot. | Still explains crowds largely through cognition inside each person’s head. |
| Social constructionist (Mummendey) | Whether an act counts as aggression depends on someone’s judgment. | Questions whether measures such as shock duration are neutral. | Proposes no rival causal mechanism. |
Vilanova and colleagues (2017) reviewed the theory from Le Bon to SIDE. They argue its history is cumulative refinement, not a string of false starts. They suggest its next contribution lies in application: promoting prosocial behavior, preventing social disturbance, and reducing prejudice among children.
A further criticism concerns the level of explanation. Even SIDE explains crowds through what happens inside each member’s head, such as which identity is salient.
Marsh, Rosser, and Harré (1978) argued that football crowd behavior is often symbolic and ritualistic, governed by unwritten rules about acceptable targets and acceptable violence. Genuinely uncontrolled aggression breaks out only occasionally.
Mummendey (1996) offered a social constructionist challenge. Whether behavior counts as aggressive is a judgment, so shock duration or sweets stolen are never perfectly neutral measures.
SIDE also resembles normative influence, which means conforming to fit in with a group. People orient to the norms of whichever identity is salient, even when no audience is physically present.
Examples of Deindividuation
At its extremes, deindividuation has been linked to the collective behavior of violent crowds, such as lynch mobs. It has also been applied to genocide, stereotyping, and disinhibited behavior online.
Masks, Self-Awareness, and Prosocial Behavior
Masks do not simply erase identity. Mullen, Migdal, and Rozell (2003) found that wearing a mask did not straightforwardly abolish a person’s sense of self or social identity. It can instead trigger a search for identity through other cues, such as ethnicity.
Self-awareness can also raise good behavior. Earlier studies often left participants feeling that the researcher expected them to help. That confounds the result.
Lewis, Himmelberger, and Elmore (2021) used a new paradigm that removed the researcher’s presence during the key test. Among 36 college students, those in the self-aware condition were more prosocial than controls. The authors also discussed the importance of studying self-awareness in light of the coronavirus.
The sample is small. The finding awaits replication at a larger scale. Its design does address a confound closely analogous to the one Johnson and Downing identified in Zimbardo’s hooded costume.
Genocide
Researchers such as Staub (1989) believe deindividuation is a necessary factor in genocide. Hitler and Mussolini both drew on Le Bon’s crowd theory when building their programs of mass internment and murder (Postmes and Spears, 1998).
Encouraging deindividuation among group members reduces self-awareness and personal responsibility.
Authoritarian governments often build organizations and military units designed to enhance deindividuation. Uniforms and strict rules of conduct help individuals commit violence by reinforcing conformity and diffusing responsibility (Woolf and Hulsizer, 2007).
The SS took this further.
Hitler’s youth and the Khmer Rouge relied on deindividuation the same way. Members were expected to endure danger and submit to authority, fighting and killing from the start.
This bred unquestioning loyalty.
Shared training, experience, and privilege built strong group ties, and ordinary rules did not legally apply to SS members. As a result, deindividuation fed collective actions that broke down the moral prohibitions against mass murder (Staub, 1989).
The Internet
Deindividuation research has also examined anti-normative behavior in computer-mediated communication, such as the internet.
Lee (2007) studied how deindividuation affects group polarization during online communication. Participants either shared personal information (individuated) or stayed completely anonymous (deindividuated) before discussing several social problems.
Deindividuated participants identified more strongly with their partner. They also relied more on that shared identity, and less on how strong their partner’s arguments were, when deciding whether to change their opinions. This fits the SIDE model, which predicts that anonymity heightens the influence of social identity.
A newer study went further.
- Aim: Zimmerman and Ybarra (2016) tested whether online anonymity increases aggression, and whether another person’s aggressive or supportive behavior changes that effect.
- Method: Participants completed a team word-unscrambling game through blog-style posts, either anonymously or with their identity visible. A scripted “model” participant reacted to a team setback aggressively or supportively.
- Results: Anonymous participants posted more aggressively overall. An aggressive model made this worse: anonymous participants who saw aggression responded far more aggressively than those who did not.
- Conclusion: Online anonymity increases aggression, but not uniformly. It makes people more responsive to the visible norms around them, matching the SIDE model’s prediction of conformity to locally salient norms.
Deindividuation online is also linked to other rule-breaking. Hinduja (2008) found that people who prefer anonymity and pseudonymity online were more likely to pirate software than others.
Online Disinhibition and Cyberbullying
Deindividuation’s logic extends from physical crowds to online communication, where people are less identifiable, less visible, and less personally accountable.
Joinson (1998) argued that many online behaviors, from candid self-disclosure to hostility, reflect a general lowering of inhibition. Suler (2004) named this the online disinhibition effect and distinguished two forms:
- Benign disinhibition: people share more of themselves and offer more support than they would face to face.
- Toxic disinhibition: flaming, meaning bursts of hostile, denigrating language aimed at other users.
What Drives Online Disinhibition
Joinson (2003, 2007) and Suler (2004) identified four features of online interaction that drive disinhibition:
- Anonymity: not being identifiable.
- Invisibility: not being seen, even when your identity is known.
- Asynchronicity: not having to respond, or be responded to, in real time.
- Textuality: communicating through text rather than face-to-face cues.
Lapidot-Lefler and Barak (2012) tested which ingredient matters most.
- Aim: They tested whether anonymity, invisibility, or lack of eye contact contributes most to toxic online disinhibition.
- Method: Participants held online discussions in which anonymity, visual invisibility, and eye contact were manipulated independently. The researchers measured flaming and threatening language.
- Results: Lack of eye contact had the strongest and most consistent effect on flaming and threats, exceeding anonymity and invisibility on their own.
- Conclusion: The absence of the social feedback carried by eye contact, more than anonymity alone, most powerfully licenses hostile online behavior. The authors proposed “online unidentifiability” as a more precise driver.
The study refines the disinhibition account rather than overturning it.
Cyberbullying
Kowalski, Limber, and Agatston (2008) catalogued the behaviors that fall under cyberbullying:
- Flaming: mutual, escalating hostility between users.
- Harassment: repeated insults aimed at a target.
- Denigration: spreading damaging rumors or gossip about someone.
- Outing and trickery: exposing private information or tricking someone into revealing it.
- Exclusion: deliberately shutting someone out of an online group.
- Impersonation: posing as someone else to damage their reputation.
- Happy slapping: filming and circulating footage of someone being humiliated or attacked.
- Cyberstalking and cyberthreatening: sustained, frightening pursuit of a target online.
Many of these behaviors depend on the perpetrator’s reduced identifiability and accountability. Both classic and social identity accounts of deindividuation treat those ingredients as central.
Reducing Deindividualization
Those with greater levels of self-awareness show lower rates of anti-normative behavior because of deindividuation. This self-awareness has often been simulated by mirrors (Postmes and Spears 1998).
For example, students who take tests in front of mirrors cheat at lower rates than those who do not (Diener and Wallbom, 1976).
Online, self-awareness is not the only lever. Anonymous users appear especially sensitive to visible social modeling, as Zimmerman and Ybarra’s (2016) experiment showed.
Platforms that make constructive norms visible, such as surfacing supportive replies, may therefore reduce toxic behavior without removing anonymity. Interface features that restore a sense of the other person’s humanity may help too, since lack of eye contact drove toxic disinhibition most strongly.
Real-name requirements target only the classic mechanism. They also carry privacy costs for users with good reason to stay anonymous, such as abuse survivors.
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Further Information
- Reicher, S. D., Spears, R., & Postmes, T. (1995). A social identity model of deindividuation phenomena. European review of social psychology, 6(1), 161-198.
- Vilanova, F., Beria, F. M., Costa, Â. B., & Koller, S. H. (2017). Deindividuation: From Le Bon to the social identity model of deindividuation effects. Cogent Psychology, 4(1), 1308104.
