As someone who as always crime shows and attempted to use psychology to measure why the suspects acted the way they did, this lesson was extremely interesting to learn about. The idea of deindividuation always surprises me or gets me thinking the most. Deindividuation is a diminished sense of self-awareness that suggests that people under the cover of anonymity may deliberately choose to engage in behaviors that might be considered wrong (Gruman, 2016). Specifically in a growing world that uses technology and social media to communicate. Online, you can hide who you are and not worry what any repercussions are. People feel more comfortable saying things that they know they should not. I sadly, had the chance to apply these ideas in real life.
In high school, teenagers make not the brightest decisions. There were some crazy instances, but one comes to mind specifically for me when discussion deindividuation. Social media is a huge problem that contributes to this idea. My sophomore year of high school, someone made an Instagram account that took pictures of people in the halls or through windows and then posted them anonymously and made fun of them. It went on for an extremely long time as the school could not discover who was running it and every time Instagram was contacted to shut the account down, it would just restart. This person or group of people was hidden from the world, free to make these comments without any judgment. It reached a point where local police had to get involved because they somehow installed cameras around school hallways and posted footage to social media. Unfortunately, that was their mess up because the cameras were used to track the IP address. It turns out, it was a group of students who were being bullied and were targeting their bullies to make them feel the same pain. The idea of deindividuation allowed those people to make those comments because their identities were hidden, and they could engage in behaviors that often would be deemed inappropriate.
Social media sadly creates this ability for many people. I am sure that this was and is not the only instance where something like this has happened. They have made television shows about things like this, catfishing, and gold-diggers. Social media contributes and gives everyone this new ability to engage in behaviors that are socially deemed inappropriate or wrong. Most times, there are minimal repercussions because the identity is never found. This can further contribute to criminal behavior. Before social media, how often did you hear about anonymous hackers? Before, you had to try to cover your face and run into the building to get what you wanted; but now, the internet and social media gives this possibility of remaining anonymous in unacceptable behaviors. I believe it further contributes to the criminally offensive portion to deindividuation because it allows those who engage in illegal behavior a new way to access these things.
Applied Social Psychology : Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Jamie A. Gruman, Frank W. Schneider, and Larry M. Coutts . SAGE Publications . 2016
I see that we wrote about similar topics for this week’s blog post, which we both wrote about social media crimes and deindividuation. What makes it hard to catch these criminals is that they are hiding their identity, sometimes to the extent of hiding their real IP addresses. When they do that, it makes local and state police hard to prosecute the perpetrators, unless they have technology that higher organizations such as what the FBI uses. And surprisingly, not many states have the proper cyber crime laws to punish convicts properly. For example, defamation (libel and slander) is a common crime that happens online, but only 13 states have criminal libel laws that are still enforced today (Stebbins). I really think that criminal justice reform should be conducted to fit the current trend of crimes, which starts from being able to investigate anonymous criminals.
Reference:
Stebbins, Andrew. “Is Libel a Crime? Guide to Criminal Defamation Laws.” Edited by Aaron Minc, Minc Law, Minc Law, 27 Nov. 2019, https://www.minclaw.com/criminal-defamation-libel-laws/.