DEINDIVIDUATION

On November 5, 1990, three men and two were arrested for a Halloween attack on Wards Island. The attack was on homeless men, during which nine were injured and one was killed. Four of the arrested were charged with second-degree murder while the fifth was charged with attempted murder. According to the police, besides the four, there might have been as many as 18 that have taken part in the attack. The arrest was made four days after the police discovered Carlos Melendez, a homeless man, lying dead with his throat slashed. The other nine were beaten and cut with meat cleaver on Halloween night by young men wearing masks. They carried with them many weapons to beat the homeless men.

First described by Leon Festinger, deindividuation occurs when there is a situation in which individuality is decreased, resulting in the dwindle of responsibility and identity. Festinger discovered that as deindividuation occurs, violence and aggressiveness increase. One experiment studying deindividuation took place in Halloween. During Halloween, children dressed up in costumes, hiding their identities. The purpose of the experiment was to see children would take more candy when they felt deindividuation. The result showed that children who felt that way had higher chances of taking more candy than needed.

Similar to the children who felt deindividuation, the young men who wore masks felt less responsible and lost their sense of identities. As a result, they were prone to violent and aggressive behaviors such as beating and killing of homeless men. The reason is not that they were delinquents and came from troubled family backgrounds, but rather that they felt less responsible for their behaviors.

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