Deindividuation

​​​​​​​Gustave Le Bon introduced the concept of the group mind. He suggested that under certain circumstances people lose their identity and merge with the crowd. This deindividualization is associated with the loss of inhibitions and the tendency of people to behave in an atypical and anti-normative way. Historically, people have been very slow to free themselves from an individualized existence steeped in broad kinship, tribal, and ancestral relationships.

Erich Fromm studied the emergence of individuality in human history and the sense of uniqueness and freedom that accompanies this development. According to Fromm, individualization is accompanied by a sense of isolation, which often motivates people to join different groups.

Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb suggested that focusing a person on a group, which is related to their attraction to the group, reduces the attention given to specific people. This focus on the group deindividualizes its members, who are relegated to the background and, in a sense, morally sheltered in this group. Therefore, deindividualization reduces the prohibitions of a particular person in relation to engaging in anti-normative actions. According to this formulation, group attraction increases deindividualization, which in turn releases behavior normally held back by inhibitions.

Ziller suggested that people learn to associate individualization with rewarding situations, and deindividualization with potentially punishing ones. A person learns to expect rewards for good performance of certain tasks and wants to be individually responsible for such actions. However, whenever he finds himself in a situation of waiting for punishment, he will have a tendency to hide or dissipate responsibility by taking a back seat in the group.

Zimbardo suggested that numerous and diverse factors can cause deindividualization, in addition to focusing on the group or wanting to avoid negative assessment of moral responsibility. These factors include anonymity (in any form), the size of the group, the level of emotional arousal, the novelty and uncertainty of the situation, the changed time perspective (for example, due to drug and alcohol use), the degree of involvement in group activities, and so on.

All these factors lead to the loss of an individual's sense of identity or self-awareness, which in turn causes a decrease in their sensitivity to external stimuli and a loss of cognitive control over their emotions and motivations. The result is behavior that is usually controlled by internal forces, both positive (love) and negative (aggression). A deindividualized person is less susceptible to positive or negative sanctions from agents who do not belong to this group, and therefore his behavior is less subject to external rules and norms.

Diner undertook a further theoretical modification of this concept, linking deindividualization with self-awareness. People who lose their individuality do not pay due attention to their own behavior and are poorly aware of themselves as separate beings. The result is an inability to exercise current control or analysis of one's behavior and an inability to extract appropriate behavioral norms from the long — term memory storage. Deindividualized people also lack foresight, and their behavior suffers from a lack of thoughtfulness or planning.

A fairly wide range of anti-normative behavior was associated with individualization and deindividualization.