Who is it? The study of anonymity and behavior. (2023)

In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, an APS fellow at Stanford University, dressed female students in lab coats, some plain with hoods that concealed their identity, and others with name tags and no hoods. He challenged the students to administer an electric shock to a Confederate. Hooded participants were twice as likely to comply.

Zimbardo's study was a formative piece of a large body of research showing a link between anonymity and abusive behavior. Scientists have found that many people tend to act rude, aggressive, or illegal when their faces and names are hidden.

However, recent studies have identified the positive qualities of anonymity, including digital interactions, which may be overlooked given the attention trolls and hackers receive. Just like meeting in person at support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, the internet has given people the opportunity to speak up and offer support without showing their faces or revealing their real names.

Behavioral studies on the role of anonymity in online interactions have yielded mixed results. Overall, researchers have found that anonymity can reveal personality traits that face-to-face interactions can hide, but that it also allows for strong group rules and values ​​to guide individual behavior.

group coverage

In 1981, social psychologist Leon Mann demonstrated how being in a crowd can cause people to behave not only offensively but also violently. Mann studied newspapers from 1964 to 1979 to examine reports of apparent suicide attempts, particularly cases in which someone threatened to jump from a tall building, bridge, or tower. Mann narrowed the reports down to 21 cases, which included crowds at the scene, noting that in 10 cases people encouraged the suicidal person to jump, and in three of the cases they actually jeered when rescuers prevented death. Mann found one instance where the crowd was yelling obscenities and throwing rocks and debris at the rescue team. Factors such as the physical distance between the crowd and the potential jumper (allowing their cheers to be heard but not identifying their faces) and the cover of darkness made viewers feel anonymous in a way that would not in various types of crowds.

This phenomenon can also occur on busy city streets and highways. For example, psychologist Patricia Ellison-Potter of the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has shown in driving simulation experiments that people are more likely to drive aggressively when they are less visible (for example, when drive a car with tinted windows). when they can be seen by other drivers (for example, driving an open convertible).

Such group behavior is alive and well on the Web. Often considered the rotten basement of the internet, 4chan serves as a hub for racist, sexist, homophobic, and grotesque images and text. 4chan's mostly anonymous users are notorious for trying to outdo one another, grossing out and "trolling" new users and proving they have the lowest threshold of decency. They conspired to harass the parents of a teenager who committed suicide and flood epilepsy forums with images that suddenly flashed and contained patterns designed to induce seizures. While the site originally operated without moderation or supervision, the operators of the 4chan site had to step in to block the distribution of child pornography on the site.

A 2012 study by Marek Palasinski of Lancaster University in the UK tested men looking at a simulated chat room that they believed was real. Men were less likely to intervene after seeing an "elder" ask an "underage woman" for personal information and nude photos when a chat room consisted of strangers rather than acquaintances and in a room with many others users instead of a few.

In a revealing 2001 study, Dutch social psychologist Tom Postmes and his colleagues found support for the idea that behavior is determined by social group identity. Groups were asked to brainstorm solutions for a hospital struggling to meet the needs of patients. Some anonymous groups unknowingly were peppered with efficiency ideas and proposed efficient solutions for the hospital. Armed with friendly, positive, and helpful ideas, other groups proposed patient-centered solutions. When the groups were not anonymous, this priming effect disappeared. It turns out that the room you are in can play a big role.

In 2016, Postmes joined a team of psychologists, including APS member Russell Spears (University of Groningen) to write a short letter on anonymous groups for the magazine.Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In their conclusion, they wrote: "A comprehensive examination of the evidence shows that the problems of 'bad' groups lie not in general 'bad' group psychology, but in specific 'bad' group norms. Violent groups normatively validate acts of violence Conformist groups normatively invalidate critical comments.

These authors also offer a recipe: "The solution to problematic crowd and group behavior is to challenge and change toxic group norms." Therefore, solving the problem of online aggression may involve figuring out how to change the norms of a particular environment.

Anonymity and social signals.

in a 2011Perspectives in PsychologyIn this article, Jacob Hirsch, APS fellow Adam Galinsky, and Chen-Bo Zhong write that people in anonymous settings tend to act in accordance with their natural dispositions. Anyone can feel a sense of anonymity in a crowd, they say, but research suggests that aggressive people are more likely to increase violence.

Similarly, among Finnish spectators surveyed at an ice hockey game in 1997, people who self-reported that they would be more likely to break up a fight in the stands had lower levels of personal aggression than those who indicated that they would not intervene.

However, social cues can also shape the behavior of an anonymous person. In 2016, psychologists Adam Zimmerman of Florida International University and Gabriel Ybarra of the University of North Florida studied aggression in players in an unwinnable game. "Social modeling" was found to have a large impact on their behaviour. Anonymous participants reacted more aggressively when they witnessed aggression and less when they did not.

Dear to dear

You don't need the protection of a group to unleash the awkward nature of anonymity. A 2016 study led by Christopher Bartlett of Gettysburg College surveyed college students and found that people who felt their identities were being falsified online were more likely to report cyberbullying and have positive attitudes about cyberbullying over the course of a year. university (for example, "It's okay if someone deserves it").

In Zimmerman's aforementioned 2016 Gambler Aggression Study, participants wrote about their experiences playing the impossible-to-win game, and those with anonymous partners wrote more aggressively about those partners and, in a survey, found themselves more likely to to try to humiliate or beat up their partners, compared to non-players. anonymous participants.

"It's very easy to take that bleak image of that other person online and start creating that internal dialogue where you're letting loose on that other person," says John Suler, a professor of clinical psychology at Rider University.

Suler, a pioneer in the field of cyberpsychologyDying the psychology of cyberspace, a widely read textbook on Internet psychology, in 2001. He followed that book in 2016 withPsychology in the digital age, which focuses on improving well-being in the context of our computer-centric lives.

As researchers explored the source of toxic behavior online, they discovered that it may not be anonymity itself, but the level of ambiguity that influences a person's behavior. In 2012, psychological science researchers in Israel found that couples who communicated via computer in many anonymous or semi-anonymous conditions exhibited high rates of verbal aggression, which they called "flaming." Verbal aggression was high when they were completely anonymous in a computer chat, when they used their real names and when the bodies could be seen from the side, but not when a video caused the two partners to make eye contact. This suggests that eye contact may be an important factor separating aggression from friendliness, even when two strangers are looking into each other's eyes on the screen.

Secure sharing and support

While anonymity can make it easier for people to act antagonistic, unprofessional, or unethical, research has shown that it can also make people unusually accommodating and helpful. A 2010 study by University of Toronto researchers Vanessa Bohns and Zhong found that people in dark rooms were more likely to report that strangers' pants zippers were undone or that they had food in their teeth, saving strangers from possible inconvenience. Shame.

One of the most consistent findings from anonymity studies is that personal information is shared and secrets are revealed more frequently than in face-to-face communication. Experiments and longitudinal studies of adolescents show that relationships started and maintained online are just as strong and deep as relationships offline, and that instant messaging and other communication technologies help people maintain relationships.

Clinical psychologist Sara Erreygers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium led a study in 2017 that examined behavior patterns in more than 2,000 adolescents. She and her colleagues followed a cohort of 13-year-old boys and found that being bullied or cyberbullied does not reliably predict future bullying behavior, but positive behavior has a "positive spiral effect." Good works on the Internet generate future good works.

And this benign behavior is not limited to completely anonymous contexts. A study in Switzerland found that sharing and disclosing self-harm, depression, the death of a parent, bisexuality and other sensitive topics on YouTube video blogs, where users do not see each other personally but are visually identifiable, is widespread and occasionally uses their real names.

Suler finds a certain paradox in such findings.

"On the one hand, you feel protected and safe because you don't know the identity of the other person," he says, "but then you want to reveal all kinds of intimate things about yourself."

This type of behavior on the Internet does not seem to depend on the same aspects of communication as toxic behavior online. The same researchers who tested which aspects of computer communication cause rude behavior conducted a similar study of benign behaviors. They found that eye contact, which was a key variable in determining "flames" online, was not the fulcrum for disclosure and prosocial behavior. ¹

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