Case study 4: Phillip Zimbardo and Anonymity
American psychologist Philip Zimbardo suggested that when anonymous, individuals lose their sense of individual identity, a term coined as deindividuation. Zimbardo hypothesised that people would be more likely to engage in violent or aggressive activities when their identity was hidden as they would experience deindividuation and believe they would not be held accountable for their actions.
Zimbardo conducted a study which shared some similarities with Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment, conducted in 1963. Zimbardo’s experiment involved a group of female participants, half of whom were given hooded jackets which concealed their identity, the remaining half of the participants wore their own jackets and name tags which made them easily identifiable.
Each individual in both groups was instructed to administer electric shocks to recipients and the results showed that the deindividuated, hooded and anonymous participants administered the most shocks and for the longest period of time compared to the identifiable participants which supports Zimbardo’s hypothesis that individuals feel desensitised once they are anonymous, leading to a lessened sense of individuality and therefore a reduced sense of fear regarding consequences or repercussions.
According to Zimbardo’s deindividuation theory, anonymity encourages individuals to engage in anti-normative behaviour, administrating electric shocks to confederates in Zimbardo’s study and how anonymity facilitates deindividuation. Zimbardo’s theory can be applied to our study as anonymity is believed to be one of the motivating factors of trolling and abuse online, much like anonymity spurred the aggressive electric shocks administered by the anonymous participants in Zimbardo’s study. The apparent ‘invisibility’ of the person inflicting the abuse is believed to experience online disinhibition, engaging in anti-normative behaviour such as trolling or flaming because the anonymity allows an individual to express themselves without hesitation, relinquishing social etiquette and without fear of consequences such as legal prosecution.
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Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In W. D. Arnold & D. Levine (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, (pp. 237–307). Lincoln: University of Nebraska.
