Outside video games, I was often referred to as Golden Retriever vibes by my friends in high school. Seemingly pure and innocent. But as soon as I opened up a League Of Legends game, I turned into a crazed lunatic, shouting profanities like I was giving away televisions, and it was Black Friday. Why? Psychologists believe the main reason is deindividuation[^1]. It's the mental state where people's identity fades into the background of their thoughts so much that they become much more susceptible to cues from the environment and people around them as to how to behave. This is caused by both reduced social accountability ("you can't see me") and reduced self-monitoring of their own impulses ("I can't see me"). To study this, some psychologists decided to test the effects of deindividuation on Halloween candy stealing[^2]. Trick or treaters would come to the house where a big bowl of candy was sitting outside. A researcher would open the door, tell each kid to take one piece, say they had to do something inside, and then look through a secret peep hole in the wall to see what the kids did. The results were hilarious. Stealing was vastly affected by *how* the researcher asked trick or treaters to take candy. When the researcher didn't ask for the kids names, stealing increased. When kids were alone, stealing as less so then when they were in a group. Most incredibly, stealing was by far the highest when kids were in a group, and one kid was pointed out as being the one responsible for any other kids taking too much candy. An astounding 80% of kids took more than one piece of candy in this case. EIGHTY PERCENT! The idea is kids in the last group were deindividuated. Not only were they anonymous as they had costumes on and weren't asked for their names, they were part of a larger group and could hide their actions inside. Plus they wouldn't be blamed if something bad happened. **So having a scapegoat, an authority figure, or lots of peers who are behaving badly matters quite a bit in determining how much effort we put into curbing our own behavior.** How can we navigate this? I suggest having the attitude that what you do is *your responsibility.* Just because an authority figure told you to do it doesn't mean you can't be held accountable for heinous stuff you do. In addition, look at yourself from an outside perspective. Would you be concerned if you saw someone else doing this thing? I learned a lot of this from [[Getting Gamers]]. [^1]: Tom Postmes and Russell Spears, “Deindividuation and Antinormative Behavior: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 123, no. 3 (1998): 238–59, doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.123.3.238. [^2]: Edward Diener, Scott C. Fraser, Arthur L. Beaman, and Roger T. Kelem, “Effects of Deindividuation Variables on Stealing among Halloween Trick-or-Treaters,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 33, no. 2 (1976): 178–83, doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.33.2.178.