Anonymity and group immersion weaken self-monitoring and normative restraint.
Festinger, Pepitone and Newcomb's 1952 work. Zimbardo later showed hooded subjects administered longer shocks than identified ones — the reliable factor is reduced accountability rather than group membership as such.
In practice
- An anonymous internal feedback channel produces comments nobody would sign, some of them useful and some of them cruel.
- A crowd at a match behaves in ways almost none of its members would alone, and the individuals are genuinely surprised afterwards.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop