The Individual and Society 403reduce feelings of personal responsibility for one’s actions.
The same can be said for clothing that conceals one’s iden-
tity, the cover of darkness, sensory overload, the use of drugs
or alcohol, and collective action of a simple, repetitive (or
rhythmic) nature (e.g., marching, clapping, dancing). Diener
(1980) suggested that the anonymity associated with deindi-
viduating conditions is tantamount to a loss of self-aware-
ness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972) and hence to diminished
salience of personal standards for acceptable conduct (e.g.,
Carver & Scheier, 1999; Higgins, 1987; Vallacher &
Solodky, 1979). Lacking the usual self-regulatory mecha-
nisms for enacting and inhibiting behavior, the deindividu-
ated person becomes highly susceptible to influence from the
group and the context in which the group is acting. The
nature of this influence, however, does not map onto either
normative or informational influence in a straightforward
manner. Thus, the person is not consciously modifying his or
her behavior to court approval from others, nor is he or she
gaining a great deal of insight into physical reality from fel-
low group members.
One likely dynamic at work is akin to what Le Bon
(1895/1960) referred to asbehavioral contagion,the rapid
spread of behavior in a group context. Contagion occurs
through simple imitation of others’ behavior or through the
adoption of others’ emotional state, and thus is not particularly
taxing on people’s mental processes. A related possibility fol-
lows from emergent norm theory (Turner & Killian, 1972),
which holds that people in unstructured group settings without
clear a priori group goals are highly susceptible to cues to
higher-order meaning and guides to action that develop in the
situation. Consider, for example, the experience of walking
down New Orleans’ Bourbon Street at 2 a.m. during Mardi
Gras. This situation is ripe for deindividuation—maybe even
prototypical. You are part of a large, unstructured group con-
sisting of unfamiliar people, it’s dark and no one is paying
attention to you anyway, music is coming from all angles to
overwhelm your powers of sensory integration, and there may
have been a couple of hurricane specials consumed by this
time. But despite the complex array of sights and sounds, there
is no plan dictating your movements and shifts in attention. At
this point, if others in the throng spontaneously broke into a
rhythmic chant or began throwing plastic beads at a passing
float, you might be tempted to follow suit. The collective ac-
tion you observe provides temporary integration for the en-
semble of your specific experiences and thus functions as an
emergent norm. The norm doesn’t imply acceptance or
rejection by others—you could keep on walking and no one
would care—but it does provide a guide that allows you to
engage in concerted action rather than mere movement
(cf. Goldman, 1970; Vallacher & Wegner, 1985).
Viewed in this way, it is easy to appreciate how a state
of deindividuation can promote widely divergent action
trajectories—moral versus immoral, prosocial versus antiso-
cial, effusive versus sullen, and so on. In effect, the deindi-
viduated person is behaving in accordance with rudimentary
moment-to-moment action guides that are devoid of higher-
level meaning. This mental state is a precondition for emer-
gent understanding (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987), making the
person highly susceptible to whatever goals and plans are
rendered salient as the situation evolves. Should the situation
resolve itself as an occasion for social camaraderie, the per-
son might be inclined to laugh and dance with everyone he or
she encounters. But should the opportunity for personal gain
at the expense of others suddenly arise, the same person
could just as easily behave in a decidedly unfriendly, even
aggressive manner toward those who provide the oppor-
tunity. Social influence in this context provides personal
(if somewhat transient) coherence and direction for individu-
als’ otherwise disassembled and unregulated actions.THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETYOne of the most challenging problems in social psychology
centers on the relation between micro- and macrolevels of de-
scription. Social psychological theories are typically couched
in terms of a single level of description, with little explicit co-
ordination with theories defined at different levels. Thus, the
processes at the level of the individual tend to be independent
of group-level processes. Yet it is unreasonable to expect any
level of structure and function to operate in isolation. An in-
dividual’s behavior is influenced by the social context in
which he or she functions, and each individual in turn creates
the social context for other individuals through his or her in-
teractions with them. The nature of this mutual dependency is
difficult to capture, but recent advances in the study of com-
plex systems (cf. Schuster, 1984) are proving useful in link-
ing different levels of social reality (e.g., Nowak & Vallacher,
1998a, 1998b; Nowak, Vallacher, & Burnstein, 1998; Nowak,
Vallacher, & Zochowski, 2002). In this section, we describe
one relevant approach—cellular automata—that has estab-
lished a track record in this regard in recent years. Other
approaches (neural networks, coupled dynamical systems)
are showing promise as well, and the reader is referred to the
sources cited above for a description of them.The Cellular Automata ApproachCellular automata models (Gutowitz, 1991; Ulam, 1952; von
Neumann, 1966; Wolfram, 1986) capture important features