Halloween is probably my favorite time of year. I love it because you can be whatever you want to be and almost do whatever you want. One of my favorite things to do is to run around neighborhoods acting all sorts goofy: dancing in the street, chasing a friend of mine, being chased by a friend of mine, and most of all scaring other people. Little did I know that the term for acting this way was deindividuation. Deindividuation is the loss of a person's sense of individuality and the reduction of normal constraints against deviant behavior (Zimbardo, 1969).Whenever I would go trick-or-treating, I usually went in a group or with at least one other person. The addition of people to do stuff with me helped lower the accountability I would feel for doing some act of silliness I would undoubtedly perform. By lowering the accountability, I would not feel as responsible for my actions (Dodd, 1985). Also the addition of the mask also prevented the people on the outside from knowing who I was. This addition of the mask helped me lose my sense of self-awareness which also helped me increase my deviant acts (Beaman et al., 1979).
One of my goals in my life is to build a haunted house that would play on all the major fears. While I'm nowhere near the point of being able to create said haunted house, I was the mastermind behind the haunted house that was built on the second floor of Mabee two years ago. These are just a couple of the pictures from the maze. More can be seen on my Facebook.
Overall, the maze was a resounding success. When the professors brought their children around, about three-quarters of them made it through completely and a good number of those that did were crying or wanting to escape Mabee hall. When it was actually dark in the maze, we scared a good number of college students as well. Our floor won scariest hall for that year and had the maze building banned the following year. All I can say is WOOT!
References:
Beaman, A. L., Klentz, B., Diener, E., & Svanum, S. (1979). Objective self-awareness and transgression in children: A field study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1835-1846.
Dodd, D. K. (1985). Robbers in the classroom: A deindividuation exercise. Teaching in Psychology, 12, 89-91.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 17, 237-307.
Posts
3 comments:
Thats funny sounds like an awesome haunted house/hall.
Halloween is perfect for deindividuation I remember one year me and about ten friends were trick or treating. We rang the door bell at one house and the lady came out to yell at us for ringing the bell when her lights were off. In the middle of the scream fest one of my friends who had a costume that covered his face ran from the back and yelled MOSH PIT and pushed the rest of us inside of her house... she was less than impressed.
I love that now I know a perfect explanation for all the crazy things people do on Halloween. Deindividuation contributed to many TPed houses, knocked over mailboxes and saran wrapped cars in my careless high school days!
That's pretty funny that y'all got it banned for the next year. I've started to realized that deindividuation contributed to a lot of stupid things that I did in high school too, like when me and a bunch of friends would paint our bodies up for football games. I definitely said a lot of stupid things to referees and big football players that I would have never said if I wasn't covered in paint and surrounded by a lot of other people covered in paint.
Post a Comment