Step 3: Research about deindividuation in warfare and masked or uniformed groups
A reminder from my first four blog posts that deindividuation is where individuals lose self control, awareness and personal accountability in a group setting. These are environments, where people are susceptible to mob mentality as your personal actions can be justified if everybody else is doing it. Individuals then participe in actions and trends, showing impulsive behaviours that they would typically avoid if alone. The larger the group, the greater sense of deindividuation, and loss of one’s self.
In this blog post, I will be discussing deindividuation in warfare, groups that must wear a mask or a uniform. It has been shown that wearing a uniform or a mask, participating in warfare hides individual identity, which can lead to aggressive and anti-social behaviour. War shows higher rates of immorality, aggression and violence as they believe that they are fighting for their country, showing patriarchy. Since they are participating with other people, who believe that they are all doing the right thing as a group, they lose sense of personal identity and accountability, replacing with a group identity.
Let’s look into the Stanford Prison Experiment for some proof of this type of deindividuation. Philip Zimbardo conducted a two-week stimulation of a prison environment with 24 participants who were assigned a role of a prisoner or a prison guard. The experiment was forced to end on the sixth day, after the participants assigned the role of a prison guard took extreme actions to respond to the prisoners with force. They escalated their tactics to forcing the prisoners into deep sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and arbitrary punishments. This experiment was called off for being an unethical and inaccurate. The flaws added up after it was found that Zimbardo was coaching the guards on how to behave and it was a theatrical demonstration rather than a scientific experiment. Even with the flaws of this experiment, we can still see how prison guards or any form of warfare can have a loss of identity when their uniforms and sunglasses stripped their identity, they acted as a unit within an institution system leading to a diffusion of responsibility and the anonymity of being part of an experiment. (1)
There are many other experiments with less moral complaints that show this form of deindividuation within a group of uniformed individuals. The next example is the Diener Halloween Candy Study 1976 in Seattle. Diener and his team made observations of 1,352 trick-or-treater children and 27 different houses. In this experiments, the researchers set up at a house would open their door and ask the children to take ONE piece of candy each from a bowl on a table, before telling the children that they were needed in a matter elsewhere, and leaving the children alone. About two feet away from the candy was also a bowl full of pennies and nickels. The kids who were in groups took the extra candy more frequently, due to mob mentality where they lost identity and responsibility within a group. Some kids were even asked their names, so naturally the children who did not provide their names took the most. (2) Children who were alone and identified stole candy 7.5% of the time, while children who were anonymous and in a group stole candy 57.7% of the time. 1.6-2.3 extra candies were stolen on average, “the amount that they could hold in their hand”. (3) Following the theme of masked individuals for this step of the blog post, children who were both masked and anonymous and in a group had the highest rate of stealing, taking extra candy or money almost 60% of the time.
The last experiment that we will be looking at is the Zimbardo Hooded Shocks Experiment (1969) where female students were asked to give an electric shock to another person (a confederate). He dressed half of the female students in lab coats with identity-concealing hoods and half the female students with name tags and no hoods. They were simply asked to give the confederate a electric shock, but it was found that the anonymous, hooded participants pressed the shock button for twice as long as the identifiable participants. This experiment was meant to prove a link between anonymity and abusive behaviour. (4) Their behaviour was due to the reduction of accountability and self-awareness brought by the anonymity of the heavy lab coats and the hoods. The findings of the experiment showed that deindividuation could lead to a disinhibition of aggressive behaviour. (5)
While these experiments do not demonstrate real warfare, they represent the violence of humans who can overlook personal morals when they have a sense of anonymity in a group setting. Soldiers and warriors all through history have changed their appearance, their clothes, hair style and mannerisms when preparing for a battle. Studies prove that in 90% of the cultures where wartime opponents were mutilated or tortured, the acts were done by warriors who radically altered their appearance, such as war paint, piercings and masks. (6) There are dark psychological forces in factor during war, besides just deindividuation, such as obedience, moral disengagement, groupthink and in-group biases that enable ordinary soldiers to commit atrocities. “The uniform flattens individuality. The helmet hides your face. Your voice is one in a chorus. The pronoun shifts from I to we and we is harder to hold accountable … the violence becomes ‘ours’ rather than ‘mine’ and the moral sting is diluted in the the bloodstream of the collective.” (7)
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/thoughts-on-thinking/202510/the-lessons-of-the-trick-or-treat-study
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/between-you-and-me/201410/why-halloween-makes-us-act-antisocial
- https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-the-study-of-anonymity-and-behavior#:~:text=In%201969%2C%20APS%20Fellow%20Philip,twice%20as%20likely%20to%20comply
- https://achology.com/psychology/the-dark-side-of-human-behavior-the-impact-of-the-zimbardo-deindividuation-study/?srsltid=AfmBOopKmly1dAKiFBlPQxyOM2KfFkhUniEsKh9UEPPwPouukrRFq4nE
- https://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/06/deindividuation-character-creator-stab-them-in-the-face/
- https://www.thebrink.me/the-psychology-behind-war-crimes-why-soldiers-follow-orders-dehumanize-enemies-and-commit-atrocities-against-their-conscience/
