People say and do things online that they would not in person, sometimes more openly and kindly, sometimes more cruelly.
Suler, a psychologist at Rider University, set out the idea in a 2004 article in CyberPsychology & Behavior. He listed six interacting factors: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, in which the other person's words become a voice in one's own head, dissociative imagination, in which the online world feels like a game apart from real life, and minimisation of authority. He called the loosening benign when it produced disclosure, generosity and support, and toxic when it produced rudeness, anger and threats. He also argued that disinhibition does not reveal a hidden true self. It moves the person to a different configuration of the same self.
In practice
- A reviewer who would never say a colleague's work is rubbish to their face writes exactly that in an anonymous feedback form.
- A member of a support forum tells strangers about a private struggle that they have not told their family.
- Possible explanations
- Suler's account is that several features of online communication loosen the checks that govern face-to-face talk: others cannot see you or always know who you are, replies arrive later, and the exchange feels like a separate space with its own rules. Which way the loosening goes depends on the person and the setting.
- In its favour
- Lapidot-Lefler and Barak's 2012 experiment found that anonymity, invisibility and lack of eye contact all contributed to toxic disinhibition. Rosner and Kramer's 2016 study of online comments found that anonymity and the tone of other comments both shaped how aggressive commenters were.
- Against it
- The concept began as an informed description of online communities rather than an experiment, and its six factors overlap and have rarely been separated in tests. Postmes, Spears and colleagues argue that anonymity does not strip away norms but makes group norms count for more, and a 1998 meta-analysis by Postmes and Spears found no consistent support for the older view that anonymity as such releases antisocial behaviour.
- Standing
- Compare Deindividuation, the SIDE Model, the Greater Internet F*****d Theory and Context Collapse.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind