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Deindividuation is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as the loss of self-awareness [1] in groups, although this is a matter of contention ...
For example, deindividuation has been found to foster group identification and to induce greater opinion polarization in small groups communicating online. [20] In order to understand effects of factors such as anonymity and reduced cues on group behavior, one needs to take the social and inter-group context into account.
The idea of a "group mind" or "mob behavior" was first put forward by 19th-century social psychologists Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon.Herd behavior in human societies has also been studied by Sigmund Freud and Wilfred Trotter, whose book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War is a classic in the field of social psychology.
A loss of self is sometimes referred to using the alternative term deindividuation. Further, although the term depersonalization has been used in clinical psychology to describe a type of disordered experience, this is completely different from depersonalization in the sense intended by self-categorization theory authors.
The psychology of a crowd is a collective behaviour realised by the individuals within it. A category of social psychology known as "crowd psychology" or "mob psychology" examines how the psychology of a group of people differs from the psychology of any one person within the group.
In analytical psychology, individuation is the process by which the individual self develops out of an undifferentiated unconscious – seen as a developmental psychic process during which innate elements of personality, the components of the immature psyche, and the experiences of the person's life become, if the process is more or less successful, integrated over time into a well-functioning ...
The size of the group also has an effect on how susceptible the group will be to polarization. The greater the number of people in a group, the greater the tendency toward deindividuation. In other words, deindividuation is a group-size-effect. As groups get larger, trends in risk-taking are amplified. [3]
He wanted to find out when collective aggression towards an individual, who was about to commit suicide (e.g. encouraging to jump of a large building), would cause an outsider to join the baiting crowd in this process of deindividuation. In ten of these 21 cases several factors may have led to deindividuation where baiting occurred. [3]