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Anonymous
One aspect of social learning that tends to inhibit aggression is the tendency most people feel toward taking responsibility for their actions. But what happens if this sense of responsibility is weakened? Philip Zimbardo has demonstrated that persons who are anonymous and unidentifiable tend to act more aggresively than persons who are not anonymous. In Zimbardo's experiment, female students were required to shock another student (actually a confederate) as part of a "study of empathy." Some students were made "anonymous;" they were seated in a dimly lit room, dressed in loose-fitting robes and large hoods, and never referred to by name. Other were easily identifiable; their room was brightly lit, no robes or hoods were used, and each woman wore a name tag. As expected, those students who were anonymous administered longer and more severe shocks. Zimbardo suggests that anonymity induces "deindividuation," a state of lessened self-awareness, reduced concern over social evaluation, and weakened restraints against prohibited forms of behavior. Such a process may explain the wild, impulsive acts of violence typically associated with riots, vigilante justice, and gang rape. When a person is part of a crowd, he or she is "faceless" and, therefore, takes less responsibility for his or her actions.
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