Reicher, S. D., Spears, R. & Postmes, T. (1995). European Review of Social Psychology, 6(1), 161–198.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract or from what the work is standardly cited for. A reading should check it first.
Why this is here
Recasts crowd “deindividuation” as identity shift (Hornsey, NOTE-1253, p. 210). It bears on CASE-104’s chants and boycotts, and on the record’s crowd and collective-action cases.
Read in its place
The work cannot be read here, so the record holds it at second hand.
Spears & Postmes 2015 (NOTE-1280), by two of its three authors. It gives the model the 1995 paper named. Anonymity and immersion bring a switch from personal to group identity, not a loss of self. Its cognitive dimension (“anonymity of”) raises group salience; its strategic dimension (“anonymity to”) frees in-group-normative behaviour from out-group sanction. It also gives the experiments on each side: Reicher 1984, Spears et al. 1990, and Reicher & Levine 1994a and b. Missing still: the 1995 paper’s own argument and its review of deindividuation research, how it first stated the two dimensions, and anything it says about crowds that the later CMC framing leaves out.