Read Deindividuation and Seung Hui Cho at The Situationist. Below is an excerpt:
Phil Zimbardo, in his great book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, describes”how a simple change in one’s external appearance can trigger dramatic changes in overt behavior.”The term of art is”deindividuation,”and the evidence for its powerful effects is as strong as it is disturbing.
For instance, Zimbardo reports one Milgram-like experiment in which”women in the deindividuation condition delivered twice as much shock to . . . victims as did the comparison women”who were not anonymous. It didn’t’ matter what the deindividuated women had previously felt about their shock victims. Regardless, they”increased shock time . . . over the course of twenty trials, holding their finger down ever longer on the shock switch as their victims twisted and moaned right before them. In contrast the individuated women discriminated between . . . likable and unpleasant targets, shocking the pleasant woman less over time than they did the unpleasant one.”
A problem for this idea is that, for every mass killer or torturer who was”deindividuated”before committing acts of violence and cruelty, it’s pretty easy to find at least one who wasn’t–Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Wayne Gacy–while the”intellectual authors”of the greatest crimes, the Hitlers and Stalins et al., are highly”individuated”as Great Leaders, their faces not masked but endlessly displayed and glorified. More important than the deindividuation of the violent actor, I think, is the dehumanization of his targets.