Universitatea Bucureti Facultatea de Sociologie i Asisten social Specializarea Sociologie

The deindividuation of institutionalized individuals Erving Goffman, Asylums and Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo

Profesor: Claudia Ghioiu

Nume: Butuc Prenume: Mdlina Anul I Seria 1 Grupa 2 Iunie 2013

Erving Goffman, born on June 11th 1922, was one of the most important sociologists that lived in the twentieth century. He focused his work on everyday humans behavior. He came from a Jewish family who moved to Canada at the beginning of the First World War. Goffman first studied natural sciences and he pursued a degree in chemistry. In 1945 he graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in sociology and anthropology. Some of his most important writings are The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956, 1959), Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), Strategic Interaction (1969), Relations in Public: Micro Studies of the Public Order (1971), Gender Advertisements (1979), Forms of Talk (1981). Not only he studied everyday social interactions, but he also had a big interest in sociology of mental illness. He considered the study of everyday interaction and the study of mental illness as two sides of the same coin. He is developing this subject in - Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, published in 1961. In this book, Goffman talks about totalitarian institutions like psychological hospitals, prisons, military bases, ships, boarding schools. He talks especially about the way the patients are treated in this kind of institution and about the relations between them and staff. He spent about a year and a half in Saint Elizabeths Hospital to collect proper information for his research. Goffman separates total institutions in five categories and talks about three stages of the patients : prepatient, in-patient and ex-patient. Also, Goffman is talking about the problems with the patients, about the fact that they dont obey. A process used to make the patients obey is the deindividuation. They take everything personal from patients and make them all look alike. For this essay I chose to talk about the deindividuation process existent in Erving Goffmans book, Asylusms, and in the famous Stanford Prison experiment made by Philip Zimbardo, an experiment that revealed the dark side of humans that everybody refuse to accept as a part of themselves. First I will talk about the deindividuation process. It is known as the loss of a person's sense of individuality and personal responsibility. The theory about the deindividuation was initiated by Gustave le Bon in Psychologie de foules.

The French author said that in some group situations the individual loses his self identity and the sense of responsibility. Also, when the sense of anonymity appears, the individual can go even to antisocial behavior and violent acts. Because of the loss of self-consciousness the individual releases his inhibited behavior. Now, the individual is no longer under the influence of the social norms. In fact this is what deindividuation is : a mental condition of the individual that makes him believe he cannot be identified because of different factors. Therefore the individual is acting in a different manner from his everyday life. He is acting impulsive and uncontrollable. Disinhibited behavior occurs in groups of all sizes and types, not just in the crowd. Many researchers believe that is a strong connection between antisocial behavior and anonymity. The biggest impact on researches about deindividuation was of Philip Zimbardo. In 1969 he published an article about the characteristics of this mental state. Some input variables include anonymity, loss of responsibility, group activities, group size, altered temporal perspective,[] physiological arousal, oversized sensorial input, []altered states of consciousness (alcohol, drugs). These factors can lead to impulsive, irrational, regressive, out of control behaviors. To Zimbardo the deindividuation is a hypothetical complex process in which a series of social conditions lead to changes in perception of self and others and to repressed behavior. However it was shown that the reducing of self-consciousness may occur even when the individual is not anonymous in a crowd. It has been proven that the individual is prevented by situational factors to become self-conscious. The individual is immune to the stimuli that cause self regulation, that makes him conscious again. But the deindividuation is not only leading to antisocial behavior, it can also lead to pro social behavior. This depends on individual motivation. Usually, says Diener, behaviors resulting from state of deindividuation are inhibited behaviors, even if they mean to kiss or hug someone. No matter what are the results of this state of mind, the deindividuation is harmful both for society and for individual. Although the deindividuation occurs in group situations, it can also be induced. This is the process by which individuals in totalitarian institutions are made to obey the rules.
3

The purpose of Erving Goffmans research was to analyze the characteristics of total institutions. He talks about the life people had in those institutions, about the way the staff was treating them. Inmates are subjected to <<batch living>> and its attendant indignities. Goffman drew on both his own data and research from other total institutions, such as monasteries, prisons and boarding schools to produce a general theory of the characteristics of the total institution. In Goffmans view total institutions are places of residence and work where a large number of individuals are cut off from the wider society for a period of time. There is a fundamental split between a large managed group, inmates, and a small supervisory staff. Human needs are handled in a bureaucratic and impersonal way. The social distance between the inmates and staff is great, and each group tends to be hostile toward the other. The book is made of four essays About the characteristics of total institutions, Psychiatric patient's moral career, Clandestine life of a public institution and The medical model and psychiatric hospitalization. The five categories of total institutions are : institutions constituted to nurse blind, aged, orphaned or poverty-stricken people. The second ones (tuberculosis sanitariums, mental hospitals) are institutions specialized in taking care of persons thought to be incapable of looking after themselves and also thought to be a threat to the community. The third ones are jails, penitentiaries and concentration camps. The fourth type of total institution is represented by army barracks, ships, boarding schools, work camps, colonial compounds and they perform technical tasks. And the last type is represented by the religious institutions such as abbeys, monasteries, convents and other cloisters. The whole process of institutionalization is affecting the individual on several levels. The patient goes through three stages. The first stage is the pre-patient stage, when the individual realizes that he/she is losing his/her mind and needs help. The second stage is the in -patient stage when the individual is trying to accommodate to the new world he entered, to get used to the new rules. It is also the moment when he rebels against the staff and when he is trying to escape from the institution. And the last stage is the ex-patient stage. But unfortunately not every patient gets to this stage, some of them remain in the institution for the rest of their life. Because the patients or the institutionalized individuals dont always obey the rules and the staff, they are making them to look alike. The staff is also acting in a superior way and they
4

require respect from patients. They are also treating the patients in a insulting way. It is also forbidden to the individuals to talk about the irregularities from the institution and about the bad treatment they get. Upon entering the establishment, processes are set in motion to destroy the inmate's old self and create a new self. The person is dispossessed from normal social roles, stripped of his/her usual identities. The inmate undergoes a mortification of self via physical and social abuse. Contacts with outside persons are limited and inmates cannot prevent their visitors from seeing them in humiliating circumstances. This whole deindividuation process is making really hard for the patients to get back to their normal life. They are now afraid of the exterior world and they dont know how to be themselves anymore. These individuals also need help after they leave the institution. Another use of the deindividuation process to make people obey is found in the famous Stanford Prison experiment made by Philip Zimbardo in 1971: [] a local newspaper ad calling for volunteers in a study of the psychological effects of prison life. We wanted to see what the psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. To do this, we decided to set up a simulated prison and then carefully note the effects of this institution on the behavior of all those within its walls. They were divided in two groups, the prisoners and the prison guards, by a flip of the coin. The boys in these groups were alike, there were no significant differences between them. The prisoners were taken by surprise to the fake jail. There the individuals were systematically searched and cleaned. A degradation procedure was designed in part to humiliate prisoners and in part to be sure they weren't bringing in any germs to contaminate our jail. They were dressed in a nylon dress with no underwear to make them feel humiliated and to lose selfconsciousness. They were also given numbers in order to make them feel anonymous and they were given a stocking cap to stimulate head shaving. The process of having one's head shaved, which takes place in most prisons as well as in the military, is designed in part to minimize each person's individuality, since some people express their individuality through hair style or length. In the same time the guards were left free to make their own rules for maintaining the order in the prison. The guards used psychological methods to confuse the prisoners and to punish them in the same time.
5

All these changes made one of the prisoners give up after 36 hours. The guards were acting inhuman and the prisoners were acting violent. They were all acting different from their normal behavior. The priest called to talk to them said that they were acting and thinking just like real prisoners that were trying to adapt to the prison life. The experiment was ended after six days although it was supposed to last for two weeks. By the end of the study, the prisoners were disintegrated, both as a group and as individuals. There was no longer any group unity; just a bunch of isolated individuals hanging on, much like prisoners of war or hospitalized mental patients. The guards had won total control of the prison, and they commanded the blind obedience of each prisoner. A sad conclusion is that institutionalized individuals are treated like animals and those who should take care of them are abusing their power. Those individuals are humiliated and treated in a violent way to obey the rules. But no one seem to think about the hard moments they are getting through. No one is trying to treat them firstly like human beings because they got there for a reason: they need help and is not their fault. Even we are getting through a sort of deindividuation process. We follow the crowd. We buy what they are selling us through commercials, we dress in the way they are telling us to, we eat and drink what they are telling us to and so on. But the difference between us and the institutionalized individuals is that we are free and is our fault that we are turned into robots. To sum up, we should help those who need help not despise them because in one or another way we are just like them.

Bibliography: Boncu, tefan, Social Psychology - Deindividuation . Online. Accessed on 1st June 2013. Available on :

http://www.psih.uaic.ro/~sboncu/romana/Curs_psihologie_sociala/Curs16.pdf Philip Manning, Erving Goffman. Raymond M. Weinstein, Ph.D, Goffman's Asylums and the Social Situation of Mental Patients . Online. Accessed on 1st June 2013. Available on:

http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1982/pdf/1982-v11n04-p267.pdf Erving Goffman- Asylums (review). Online. Accessed on 1st June 2013. Available on:

http://ebookbrowse.com/gdoc.php?id=316664531&url=6c140aef5d4863b2123b5 01293634379 Stanford Prison Experiment. Online. Accessed on 1st June 2013. Available on: http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/42