The Liberation of Anonymity, Part II

As noted in my last blog post, I've been thinking about alter-egos, masks, and the psychological effects of choosing to be anonymous (think of the online anonymity found in Second Life, World of Warcraft, and even anonymous commenting on other people's websites). And let's face it, Halloween is the right time of year to think about masks.

So I'm going to talk more about deindividuation, which social psychologists define as the loss of sense of self that occurs when people in a group are anonymous. More generally, deindividuation can also be thought of as the loss of self-awareness the comes with anonymity.

First, what's the effect of wearing a mask? Psychologists have addressed this question. Research on the effect of wearing a mask goes back at least as far as the 1950s. Research on mask-wearing among stutterers finds that they stuttered less when they wore a mask (e.g., Pollaczak & Homefield, 1954). In another study, children who wore masks were more likely to take (e.g., steal) extra candy when the experimenter left the room, compared to children who didn't wear masks (Miller & Rowold, 1979).

Psychologists Mullen Migdal, Rozell (2003) did a study that had participants answer various questions about how aware they felt about themselves, such as "I am thinking about who I am" and "I am alert to changes in my mood." The part of their study that is relevant here is that some of the participants answered these questions while sitting in front of a mirror; other participants answered those questions while wearing a "feature-less" mask, without a mirror. The results, graphed below, reveal that participants who wore masks reported that they were less self-aware than participants who sat in front of a mirror. (The results may seem intuitively obvious, but part the role of research is to find out whether intuitions are accurate.)





So how might this relate to superheroes (and supervillains) who wear masks? In addition to the utility of the mask—it hides the "real" identity to of mask-wearer—it can have some interesting psychological effects on the wearer. We can hypothesize that wearing a mask—and being less self-aware—might confer a variety of advantages. If you're less self-aware, then you might:
• Feel less pain
• Feel less angry, sad, etc.
• Be more aware of what is going on around you (because of being less aware of what's going on inside of you). This could be a very good thing to have happen during combat. And when fighting, you'll also be flooded with adrenaline, which will narrow your attention and further heighten your awareness of what's happening around them.

The down side, though, is that by being less self-aware, you're also more likely to have your anger, frustration, and aggressive impulses get out of control while you're fighting (and so you might inadvertently kill your enemy). For superheroes worried about not crossing the line—not being more violent than they need to be to apprehend the villain—wearing a mask can make it harder to monitor that line.

Speaking of villains, wearing a mask--being anonymous—makes people more likely to break rules. (Think back to the kids wearing masks, who took more candy). This might advantage mask-wearing villains.

So does the Joker feel that he's wearing a mask—or does his permanently disfigured face feel like that of his "real" self. What do you think?

The Liberation of Anonymity, Part I

Sorry for taking so long to blog again…been up to my ears in work, but in the future, I will post at least monthly (at the beginning of each month).

Last week, I was part of a symposium at Ashland University; we panelists addressed the question: What is a (Super)hero? Joining me on the panel were Tom DeFalco (current writer and former editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics) and Mark D. White, editor of Batman and Philosophy; Ashland history professor, John Moser, did a great job moderating the panel.

Before the panel, I had a chance to ask Tom DeFalco his opinion about a particular aspect of the alter-ego relationship between Peter Parker and Spiderman. Some background first: I've been doing some reading and thinking (and soon, some writing) on the topic of alter-egos. I've been thinking about what it would be like to be Peter Parker, and then to become Spiderman—to go swinging around the city, cracking wise, acting with derring-do—and then to go back to being Peter Parker. It's the going back to being Peter Parker that's stumped me. I imagined that, for the most part, being Spiderman was liberating. How could he then stuff this big personality (as Spiderman) back into the contained and relatively demure Peter Parker?

Tom helped me see the situation differently. First, he suggested that Peter Parker's appearance is deceiving: Basically, he lets himself be dressed by his aunt. Taking Tom's point a step further, in a way, his Peter Parker clothes are a kind of costume. They make him appear more nerdy or geeky than he actually is (although clearly he's very bright, being bright isn't the same as being nerdy or geeky). Riffing on what Tom said about this, there's a sense in which Parker's high school persona isn't dissimilar to Clark Kent's—the nerdish exterior hides a different personality underneath. (More food for thought in that, I think.)

Back to Tom: He also pointed out that, in fact, Peter Parker often has witty retorts to people, but these comebacks often go over everyone's heads. So Parker and Spiderman are similar in their dry, smart-ass sense of humor, but Parker (at least the high school version) is surrounded by people who don't get his jokes. Spiderman's villains are generally smarter than average, and so more likely to get his jokes. Extending this point, that fact that Parker has a different sense of humor than that of people around him heightens the sense of his being different than his peers (e.g., nerdy/geeky).

Tom's third point about PP/Spiderman was that wearing a mask can be very liberating, and can lead people to act differently—or in more extreme ways—than their usual selves. Tom said he'd talked to people who have gone around wearing masks (e.g., "real life superheroes"), who described the experience as being very liberating.

This last comment of Tom's got me thinking about the something I was pondering over the summer—the ways that the internet allow people to electronically wear a mask (that is, to be anonymous, or a different persona) and how it changes—or can change—our behavior. Just read comments on any newspaper, magazine, or blog website to see proof of how anonymity, or the ability to hide our identity by assuming another one, does change how people behave. The most vitriolic comments are likely to be from people who are not identified by their real names. For some people, the anonymity afforded by an internet mask leads people to let go of some—or all—of the restraint they impose on themselves in their everyday lives.

Psychologists have examined an aspect of this phenomenon that typically happens not over the internet, but in actual face-to-face encounters where otherwise law-abiding citizens lose their moral restraint. One situation in which this occurs is among soccer fans who, after their team has lost, take to the field and become violent. Psychologist explain the underlying phenomenon as deindividuation: the loss of sense of self that occurs when people in a group are anonymous—not seen as individuals and their identities are unknown to others in the group.

More about deindividuation in my next post.