This is a great blog, full of fascinating stuff. Here’s the one little thing that I don’t get, however: What’s up with all the law professor blogs these days (this one, Jurisdynamics, Money Law, etc.) that tack on so many pictures? The first picture in this post isn’t even about Cho. (I guess it’s supposed to be an example of deindividuation.) Worse, consider this typical Money-Law post — two pictures, neither of which seems relevant at all. Anyway, it’s no big deal, except that it takes a lot longer for these types of blogs to load compared to, say, Volokh, who uses pictures more sparingly (i.e., where relevant and necessary).

If such deindividuation could work for athletes playing a game with rules dictating the parameters of their physicality and violence, it is logical that social misfits such as Seung Hui Cho, Kimveer Gill, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would gravitate to this idea in order to stiffen their spine and follow through with these heinous acts. By all accounts, these young men were meek outcasts and did not possess as individuals the necessary courage to confront their own demons and classmates let alone commit these horrible acts. However, by reinventing themselves as uniformed angels of death (with their quasi-militaristic clothing and militaristic weaponry) they did not have to associate their actions with themselves nor their individual moral codes. Instead, they could delude themselves into viewing their actions as some sort of larger moral cause and themselves as martyrs as Seung Hui Cho did.

If we were to extrapolate the argument and conclusions advanced by this article – namely that changes in external appearance (such as uniforms) can radicalize the uniformed person’s behaviour – it would appear that deindividuation is a two-way street and that the public perception and treatment of those with altered external appearances can change drastically. For example, there is often less public and media outrage when uniformed soldiers or police officers are killed in battle than when civilians or non-uniformed officials are the victims. We may subconsciously tend to associate these authority figures as cogs of their respective organizations (and thus as expendable resources) rather than as individuals. The deindividuation that the uniform affords may colour society’s expectations of the uniformed as well.