So far the psychological term deindividuation, describing the loss of a person's sense of individuality in group settings, has only been applied to people who entered the radical stage.
I argue that deindividuation is a process the vast majority of people undergo from the moment they are born.
(Sociologists often claim that deindividuation leads to antinormative behaviour in groups like mobs; however, in this situation the mob is the primary group the person identifies with, and therefore they still adhere to that group's norms, according to the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Phenomena and several studies.)

We all have to navigate between our desires to be our authentic selves and to be accepted, but the vast majority of people have been successfully conditioned to prioritise the latter. Therefore they take on collective identities (group identities) in order to be accepted and out of fear of rejection by the other group members (a deindividuation process called social conditioning) while very few people hold on to their individual identities despite the repercussions. I think that social conditioning causes psychological trauma to every affected child and is the springboard for many mental illnesses and personality disorders.
Collective identities are built on two pillars: conformity and compliance, i.e. unquestioning loyalty to both the group and its leaders.
Collective identities don't even have to have a commonality or purpose; just being assigned to a group creates a group identity.
When group members act in conformity with other group members or on the orders of their leaders, they generally refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions because they only followed the crowd or orders.
Collective identities can change a person's perception and often lead to replacing the reality they see with their own eyes with what the group perceives as reality, as demonstrated in the Asch Conformity Experiments.
When the group majority or someone in a position of authority changes direction, the vast majority of the other group members will follow uncritically, no matter how radical the new position is. This is called groupshift. For example, when the leader of a conservative party that had denounced fascism in the past openly promotes fascism, fascism will become the mainstream ideology, and it will no longer be considered extreme within that party and amongst their voters.
In order to cling to power, conservative parties and politicians successfully appeal to the voters' collective identities, convincing them that their woes are caused by immigrants, the unemployed and other minorities rather than conservative policies, a technique known as divide and conquer.
Collective identities create a sense of superiority and tend to lead to the ostracisation, discrimination, terrorisation, dehumanisation and even elimination of other groups, outsiders, dissenters and misfits. Genocides are driven by collective identities.
Collective identities tend to be frequently reinforced in group settings by means of shouting chants, reciting prayers, singing anthems etc. Another example is the Pledge of Allegiance which is used to condition children in most of the United States.
Group members also tend to consider the group to be more important than its individual members, including themselves, such as people who volunteer for the army of their country.
Collective identities can easily lead to collective punishments. For someone who identifies collectively, an attack on a group member by a member of another group is usually interpreted as an attack on their own group by the other group, and therefore the entire group is targeted in retaliation which has caused uncountable massacres throughout history. Just to give you an example, hundred years ago a young black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, slipped in an elevator and grabbed the arm of the white female lift operator to catch his fall. She screamed, and someone jumped to a conclusion and called the authorities. Shortly afterwards local police and media told white people to kill black people, and so they did. Most whites didn't identify individually but by their skin colour, so the incident was not considered a (presumed) assault on a white woman by a black man but as an attack on the white community by the black community, and therefore they reacted as a whole and targeted every member of the black community. Estimates say that up to 200 black people were murdered, and a prosperous black district was erased from the landscape.
The collective identities behind collective punishments resulting in massacres are predominantly, but not exclusively, religion and ethnicity.

Another feature of collective identities is the tendency of subgroups to define themselves as the 'real' group, claiming that others are members in name only (i.e. group identity denial), such as Christians denouncing the actions of other Christians as 'unchristian' or Americans accusing other Americans of 'un-American' behaviours.

A newborn child is already aware of their self and identifies individually (after all, at the time of birth they have undergone eight months of neurological development already, developed likes and dislikes regarding sensory input such as sounds and tastes and explored their bodies), therefore regarding everybody else as an equal individual, regardless of their differences.
But from the moment they are born, they are - in the vast majority of cases - forced to take on the collective identities of their parents or caregivers (such as religion, ethnicity, nationality, social class, culture and family), and developing a sense of us also means developing a sense of them.
For example, newborn children have no racial preference regarding the people around them while 3-month-old infants already prefer the company of people of their own ethnicity.

In the early years children learn to identify with physically discernible groups, such as ethnicity, and the older they get, the more they identify with abstract groups such as nationality. And while younger children tend to unconditionally favour ingroup members, older children already learn to discriminate against group members who fail to conform. This is when the bullying starts.

Traditional fairytales and religious beliefs assist in suppressing children's individual identities by decreasing their self-esteem, introducing them to stereotypes, instilling fear of the unknown and the dread of supernatural punishment and teaching total obedience over critical thinking and conformity over individual expression. Also, forcing children to believe something without proof makes them susceptible to misinformation and propaganda, and teaching them that they are 'sinners' diminishes their confidence and induces unjustifiable feelings of guilt and shame.

Rewards, punishments, praise, reprimand and behaviour charts teach them that their value depends on how well they fulfil the expectations of those in positions of authority. They also replace the children's innate intrinsic motivation to learn with a dependency on external motivators which makes it easier to manipulate them.
I imagine that children who grow up in reward cultures are far more likely to participate in bribery cultures as adults.

Individual thinking is unique, original and creative while group member thinking stays within the accepted parameters and therefore is far less constructive. This is called groupthink.
Public education is the most important tool to eliminate individual thinking.
Education systems worldwide, with the exception of very few institutions, enforce compliance and conformity and extinguish critical thinking and individual expression in order to turn children into unquestioning subjects of their respective political systems. Because they are taught to suppress their own thoughts and ideas, the children's ability to think creatively declines rapidly.
Beginning in 1968 George Land who had developed a creativity test for NASA decided to conduct a longitudinal study on the creativity of children using the same test. The results clearly demonstrate the extent of this deindividuation process.
This is the percentage of children who scored at genius level:
Age 3-5 - 98%
Age 10 - 30%
Age 15 - 12%
Adults - 2%
Ironically, after they leave the educational system, creativity is the main criterion a potential employer will be looking for. (And even more ironically, the vast majority of employers, consciously or subconsciously, prioritise the ability to fulfil others' social expectations over all other qualities including creativity, competence and qualification.)

The educational system is focussed on what is called rote learning, both at school and in homework assignments. Rote learning is actually a contradiction in terms since it is not a learning but a memorisation process, just like someone who keeps copying a Harappan inscription will eventually be able to write it from memory yet never understand its meaning.
Rote learning is unreflective, extremely boring and, in most cases, extremely short-lived.
Getting the pupils to mindlessly parrot what others present as undeniable truths is an important part of the deindividuation process. It teaches children that any frequently repeated claims must be true and thus makes it easy to manipulate them and creates the breeding ground for authoritarianism.

Deindividuation leads to group members condemning the atrocities of other groups while celebrating those of their own, demanding privileges they deny to others, justifying the persecution of other groups as well as dissenters and misfits, holding outsiders to higher standards than group members and refusing to hold their leaders and other group members accountable, amongst many other symptoms. And the growing success of society's deindividuation efforts is reflected in the rise of authoritarianism all over the world.

Most children, to varying degrees, manage the gradual transformation from individual to collective identity, and for many the 'rebellious teen years' are the death throes of their individuality. But there will always be children who are unwilling to let go of their individual identities.

How children who resist the deindividuation process fare depends mostly on the environment and the parenting style. A child like this growing up in a liberal society, with parents who practise gentle parenting and tolerate or even encourage individual expression, will usually thrive. The same child, growing up in a conservative environment revolving around collective identities and with strict authoritarian parents, will face a constant struggle by having to fight demands to conform and comply and give up their personality, and therefore they are most likely to receive an autism diagnosis.

Society and many parents try to break these children by demanding the display of certain behaviours and the suppression of others. This can take the form of social sanctions, authoritarian parenting or structures or behavioural conversion 'therapies' such as ABA. These approaches damage the children's mental and physical health (since they are prone to develop stress-related conditions such as PTSD, gastrointestinal problems, self-harming behaviour and suicidality). They also destroy their intellectual potential by teaching them that their way of thinking is incorrect.
Furthermore, learning to unquestioningly obey authority figures leaves them vulnerable to abuse and authoritarianism.
There are three possible outcomes to these attempts (which may fluctuate):
1. The child is successfully broken and strives to suppress their individual identity, copy the behaviours and opinions of others and comply with demands from those in authority in order to achieve acceptance.
2. The child refuses to renounce their identity and defends it vehemently and sometimes violently.
3. The child mentally withdraws from a world refusing to accept them for who they are.

While resistance to the deindividuation process comes naturally to autistic people, it drains a lot of our energy as it requires us to confront the pressures from mainstream society and authorities. But renouncing our identities takes an even greater mental effort and therefore ruins our mental health.

If your child resists the deindividuation process and holds on to their individual identity, let them. They are not defective; on the contrary, human progress is the result of individuals who don't go with the crowd, who don't 'just follow orders' and who are able to think originally.

People who resist social conditioning are often described as 'not normal'. The word 'normal' derives from the word 'norm', the norm being the very narrow spectrum of behaviours and opinions tolerated by mainstream society. Progress, by definition, happens outside the norm.

Deindividuation resisters are frequently accused of oversimplifying and black-and-white thinking. The fact is that many issues are actually black and white, but that mainstream people (who only look at things through the lens of their collective identities) consider additional aspects and arguments (also called 'the big picture') that are irrelevant to rational people.
For example, on the issue of slavery, people who identified individually (like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner) considered it outright evil because they saw every human being as their equal while those who identified as white Christians defended slavery with arguments like the Curse of Ham, its economic necessity and its indispensability for maintaining the social order.

But it appears that traits associated with autism are not unique to deindividuation resisters.

Long before I realised that I'm autistic, I watched a documentary called Born Dropped Out. It described how former children of hippie parents fared in adulthood. What struck me was that these people's profiles were similar to my own, even though we had been raised in entirely opposite ways. I had a strict authoritarian upbringing revolving around collective identities while these people were free to develop individually and not forced to take on any collective identities.
I recently watched that documentary again, and suddenly it all made sense. While I had resisted the deindividuation process that was forced on me, these people had never been subjected to it in the first place, leading to similar outcomes. Just like me they had difficulties fulfilling the social expectations of others as well as accepting authority based on social constructs and hierarchies. In other words, just like me they were wanting in conformity and compliance, the two pillars of collective identities.
As they had been spared the deindividuation process, I will refer to them as deindividuation exempts.

In general, as they grow older, children undergo a neurological process known as synaptic pruning, and over the years roughly half of their synapses disappear as a result of inactivity since they are not relevant to their collective identities. However, this process only occurs to a much lesser extent (16% on average) in deindividuation resisters (and probably deindividuation exempts) who hold on to most of their synapses, which can cause reduced habituation and sensory overload but also explains their ability to logically connect facts, information and observations that appear unrelated to others ('connecting the dots on different sheets', as I call it).
Synaptic pruning is often compared to tree pruning and therefore argued to be essential for functionality. However, most trees grow in the wild without ever being pruned, and they are still fully functional, even if their appearance doesn't appeal to the taste of mainstream gardeners.

Our resistance to collective identities also explains our tendency to be rational, unbiased and incorruptible.

In a 2014 experiment, based on the aforementioned Asch Experiment, children were shown a target line and three comparison lines, and they were asked which was the correct match but misled with comments like 'most people choose line B'.
Autistic children tended to stick to their individual judgment and give the correct answer while most mainstream children trusted the supposed majority opinion and gave the wrong answer.
Interestingly, in another experiment in which participants' memories were questioned, autistic and mainstream people were equally susceptible to changing their answers based on the supposed majority opinion. The difference is probably that memory is less tangible; in the first experiment, they saw the lines before them, in the latter one, they had to think back and therefore accepted that their memory may have played tricks on them, especially since they had no reason to believe the researchers would gaslight them.

What mainstream people call empathy is in most cases merely compassion for those who share their collective identities rather than for all humans - which isn't truly empathy but what I call nosocentrism, i.e. the group looking after the group.

Many people merely retain their collective identities out of fear of ending up in social isolation otherwise, unaware that progressive people, whom they were often conditioned to fear and hate, welcome people from any background.

Because they retain the intellectual curiosity every child is born with, deindividuation resisters and exempts tend to teach themselves in areas that are of interest to them. The probably most famous of these autodidacts was Charles Darwin who developed his theory of evolution despite not having a formal scientific qualification. Another example is Gregor Mendel, a monk who studied the hereditary behaviour of peas and published his findings in a journal with a small circulation and was unable to get the attention of the scientific community. He died in obscurity in 1884, but decades later he fathered the scientific field of genetics.

In history and literature you will find that in many cases a person's perceived inner struggle between good and evil is, in fact, a struggle between their individual judgment and external pressure, i.e. others' social expectations or the orders of their superiors.
Probably the most influential, albeit little-known, person whose individual judgment made him a hero was Vasily Arkhipov, a navy officer of the Soviet Union whose disobedience prevented a nuclear world war. After the United States had unsuccessfully attempted to invade Cuba, the Cuban government requested to have nuclear missiles stationed on the island by the USSR for protection. When the missiles were detected, WW III already seemed inevitable. US Navy dropped bombs around one of the Soviet submarines to force it to surface which the captain interpreted as an attack. He ordered the launch of a nuclear missile which required the keys of all three commanding officers; the captain and the other officer inserted their keys into the launch panel while Arkhipov refused to do so and eventually convinced the others to call it off.
Other examples of people whose individual judgment triumphed over external pressure include General Joseph E Johnston of the Confederate Army who, after hearing of Robert E Lee's surrender, saw the pointlessness of continuing the American Civil War and surrendered the largest Confederate army to the Union, significantly shortening the war by defying President Davis' orders and henceforth being considered a traitor, and three US troops who, at the risk of being court-martialled and executed, unsuccessfully tried to halt the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War in which the US Army butchered an entire village, and who were subsequently ostracised by the other soldiers.
But for most people, even when they are ordered or expected to commit the most atrocious acts of violence, the struggle between individual judgment and external pressure is an easy victory for the latter. They may feel uncomfortable committing these acts, and they may regret them at a later stage, but they don't have the intellectual strength to do what they know to be the right thing.
And some don't even face this struggle at all since they have been so successfully deindividuated that not the slightest trace of individual judgment is left in their minds. These include Adolf Eichmann and others who orchestrated the Holocaust on Hitler's orders, the pilots who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and William Calley who perpetrated the aforementioned My Lai Massacre on the orders of his superior.
The consistent results of the Milgram Experiment in which subjects are ordered to administer potentially lethal 450-volt shocks to others demonstrate that two thirds of all people are too deindividuated to use their individual judgment.
All the people who drove human progress have been deindividuation resisters or deindividuation exempts who refused to uncritically conform to their groups and unquestioningly obey authorities, the very quality that is pathologised in autism, and were therefore able to develop their intellectual potential.
Until quite recently even deindividuation resisters had to subscribe to a religion, at least outwardly, if they wanted to survive (which is still the case in some countries), but you will find that many of them amended the teachings of their religions to fit their worldviews.

Galileo Galilei's father had planned for his son to become a doctor and sent him to medical school, but Galileo secretly attended geometry lectures.
On one occasion a member of Italy's most powerful family approached him with the design for a machine, expecting to be praised for his ingenuity. Even at the prospect of turning the family against him, he correctly informed him that the machine wouldn't work. When the humiliated man pulled strings to have Galileo removed from his post as chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa, he resigned of his own accord.
He supported Copernicus' theory that the sun and not the earth was the centre of our planetary system which went against the teachings of the Catholic Church. The pope ordered him to abandon the theory and never promote it again; after Galileo disobeyed the order, he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

At the age of 16 Isaac Newton defied his mother who wanted him to become a farmer like his late father and rather continued his education.
He became the second person to be appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. At that time all fellows of the University of Cambridge were obliged to take holy orders and become ordained Anglican priests. Despite being an Anglican, Newton secretly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and therefore couldn't in good conscience take the orders. So he appealed to Charles II to exempt him from the requirement since Lucasian professors were expected to be inactive in the church, anyway. The king agreed and permanently removed the requirement for the post.

As a child Ludwig van Beethoven was forced to practice the piano. But repeating the same pieces over and over bored him, and he rather improvised or made up his own tunes for which he was severely punished by his abusive father who asked him, 'What silly trash are you scratching together now? You know I can't bear that!'
In his early thirties he was already one of the world's leading composers who so far had largely conformed to the norms of the profession. But now he claimed he was dissatisfied with his past work and intended to take a new way.
And so he did, bringing the Classical period to an end and ringing in the Romantic era. He began breaking with traditions and rules and defying conventions and started experimenting. His audience was divided, and while some hailed him as the greatest musical genius of all times, others described his compositions as bizarre, overly complex, unnecessarily long and often as unplayable; to those critics he replied that this was ‘music for a later age’.
He did things that were unheard of, such as having a female lead in an opera or a chorus in a symphony, and introduced new or long-forgotten elements.
Once he took a walk with the poet Goethe during which they encountered the empress and her entourage. And while Goethe, who was a sucker for etiquette, stepped aside and doffed his hat in deference, Beethoven claimed that the others had to step aside and kept on walking.

Charles Darwin's father had planned for him to become a doctor like himself and sent him to medical school, but his son neglected his studies in order to pursue his interest in natural history. Subsequently his father sent him to Christ's College with a view to becoming a parson.
Darwin had developed his theory of evolution in 1838 and worked on it for over 20 years. He was still tying up loose ends when he received an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, outlining a similar theory. Both agreed on a joint publication, and the following year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, well aware of the vitriolic backlash he would receive from the outraged Christian world around him, including most other scientists.

Susan B Anthony first broke the law when she became part of the Underground Railroad that smuggled escaped slaves from the United States to Canada.
She became a popular advocate for women's rights, but she turned a multitude against her when at a national women's rights convention she introduced a resolution for more lenient divorce laws, comparing divorce as a refuge from abusive husbands to Canada as the refuge for escaped slaves.
After illegally voting in the presidential election of 1872 as part of her campaign for women's suffrage, she was arrested. During her trial the judge ordered the jury to deliver a guilty verdict.

Mahatma Gandhi had been brought up as a Hindu and remained one throughout his life. Yet he always denounced the caste system and the concept of untouchability which went against his strong sense of equality, despite their fundamental role in Hinduism.
When his mother allowed him to study in London, he was called before a meeting of his caste and told by the leader that leaving his country was against their religion. Gandhi remained determined, and when he was asked if he would disregard the orders of the caste, he replied that the caste should not interfere in the matter. In response the leader told the other caste members to henceforth treat him as an outcaste. He was, however, readmitted upon his return.
In London he was a member of the Vegetarian Society. When another member was expelled for teaching birth control which all other members considered immoral, he was the only one to, unsuccessfully, come to his defence and thus alienate the other members. Even though Gandhi himself opposed birth control, he felt that the issue was irrelevant to the society's objective of promoting vegetarianism.
As a lawyer in South Africa he once refused the court's order to take off his turban and rather left the proceedings. On a later occasion, though, he grudgingly obeyed - he still felt that the order was unjustified but decided to reserve his strength for fighting bigger battles.
In South Africa he also experienced racial discrimination and was repeatedly beaten up by police and others for insisting on what he considered his rights, such as walking on the footpath or travelling first class.

As a child Albert Einstein, who was intellectually privileged by a secular upbringing (apart from a short self-induced religious phase as an adolescent), broke out in tears watching a military parade. He couldn't fathom that people could act uniformly and mindlessly on the orders of someone else. He developed a hatred of everything related to the military, and when the time came for him, he moved to Switzerland and renounced his German citizenship to avoid conscription.
As a celebrity, rather than keeping his political opinions to himself in order to appease his fan base and keep authorities off his back, he used his status to promote what were considered fringe views at that time, such as equal rights for black and gay people, and called racism 'America's worst disease'. By the time of his death his FBI file contained over 1,400 pages.

When the regent of his tribe, who was also his guardian, arranged marriages for Nelson Mandela and his own son, both of them disobeyed and rather fled to Johannesburg.
Throughout his campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, he repeatedly defied authorities by ignoring bans on public appearances they had placed on him.
He unlawfully burned his passport, incited strikes, left the country and committed acts of sabotage; he was convicted and imprisoned for the latter three crimes.

By distributing flyers against the Nazi regime, Hans and Sophie Scholl knowingly committed a capital crime and turned the vast majority of Germans and fellow students against them.

Martin Luther King first broke the law at the age of 15 when he refused to give up his bus seat to a white passenger, but in the end his teacher, who was travelling with him, managed to pressure him into complying.
Following the Montgomery Bus Boycott a few years later, he was arrested for illegally protesting. This was the first of at least 29 times that he was arrested and jailed or fined.
Like many other black people in the civil rights movement he initially remained silent regarding the Vietnam War in order not to endanger civil rights legislation and alienate white allies, but eventually he felt the need to openly speak out against it, estranging many of his fellow campaigners and supporters instead.

Against the wishes of his aunt who was his legal guardian at that time and who frequently told him that he'd never make a living with his music, John Lennon accepted a residency for his band, the Beatles, in Hamburg.
In 1965 the Beatles were appointed Members of the British Empire by the queen, but four years later Lennon became the first MBE to return his insignia in protest of the UK's stance on the Nigerian Civil War, its support of the Vietnam War and his latest single slipping in the charts.
When his son Sean was born, he decided to take a career break and raise his child in a reversal of traditional gender roles, disappointing millions of his fans who had much preferred the younger chauvinistic John Lennon.

Julian Assange enjoyed a liberal upbringing with a mother who homeschooled him and encouraged his interests. He wasn't pressured to take on any collective identities and was therefore able to retain his individual identity throughout his childhood and youth, and with it his sense of fairness and justice.
As a young man he became a computer expert, hacked into other systems, offered self-developed programs and advice for free and technically assisted police in two cases of internet paedophilia.
Aware that he would make the world's most powerful his enemies, he published classified documents exposing corruption and war crimes worldwide, especially regarding the United States' War on Islam.
While he was stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was granted asylum and later citizenship, he reported on a corruption scandal involving the Ecuadorian president, putting the public interest before his personal safety.

In order to draw attention to climate change, Greta Thunberg skipped school disobeying the law, her parents and her school to hold solitary protests in front of the Swedish parliament. One of her supportive teachers describes her as 'a troublemaker, she is not listening to adults'.
In June 2025 she knowingly risked her life by joining the Freedom Flotilla to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip and spotlight the Gaza Genocide.

All these people, and many more, changed this world because when they deemed it necessary, they refused to conform and comply in the face of ostracisation, discrimination, persecution, physical violence and even murder. They did what they did because they knew it was the right thing, despite being aware that it would turn the majority and/or those in power against them.

The question remains why evolution so blatantly favours collective identities in humans despite their regressive, exclusionary, dehumanising and often genocidal nature. I suggest the answer lies in the networking skills of mainstream people: a person with multiple collective identities is bound to know a lot of people while someone who identifies individually is likely to have a very small circle of acquaintances.
For their works and ideas to gain attention or momentum, most deindividuation resisters and exempts rely on mainstream helpers who have the necessary connections. Since those at the far collective end of the neurological spectrum usually oppose progress in any shape or form, assistance will have to come from more moderate mainstream people. Greta Thunberg had no friends and initially couldn't convince anyone to protest with her; however, mainstream activists noticed her and shared her story, leading to the movement that emerged around her. Another example is Martin Luther King whose campaign would have been doomed had it not been for moderate white Christians who considered black people their equals and joined his movement.
Basically, progress is initiated by people who identify individually while those who identify collectively provide the network to spread it; it's like using the Roman infrastructure to fight Roman oppression.
And just like an electric circuit that requires plenty of conductors to carry current and enough resistors to prevent overheating, society depends on deindividuation resisters to prevent it from blowing up. This means that nature actually intends our exhausting and life-draining struggle against the savage mainstream.
Nobody knows how many great ideas, initiatives, inventions, discoveries, theories and masterpieces have never found their way to the public because their creators weren't sufficiently connected and failed to get the attention of mainstream allies (which appears to be the fate of this hypothesis as well).

The ultimate (and, of course, hypothetical) example of a deindividuation resister is Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch who acts based on their individual judgment alone and remains immune to outside influences, be they others' social expectations or orders, therefore retaining their individuality and with it their intellectual potential. At the opposite extreme end of the neurological spectrum he describes what he calls the 'last men' who have absorbed all expectations of their groups without any sense of individuality; their main objective is the avoidance of struggle, and anyone who feels differently is considered insane. ('Men are more slothful than timid, and their greatest fear is of the burdens that an uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and action would lay on them.' - Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life)

Collective identities divide communities and individuals and spread distrust and fear of each other, often leading to the most atrocious crimes against humanity, committed out of hatred against anyone who is different. While collective identities are not unique to humans, they make Homo sapiens, alongside chimpanzees, one of only two beings that deliberately orchestrate mass mortality events within their species.

This world needs more people who dare to speak out and take action against injustice, inequality and corruption, who come up with new ideas, who think for themselves and who are not afraid of the backlash. Human progress is an uphill battle against the raging mainstream, and if more children were allowed to retain their individual identities, this world could become a much better place for everybody.

Our intellectual advantage and our supposed social deficits are two sides of the same coin, and any attempts at 'correcting' the latter diminish that advantage. (In a society that has noticed the connection but refuses to see the interdependence of the two, this phenomenon has been named 'twice exceptional'.) As I pointed out in one of my speeches, The Necessity of Autism: 'It’s our failure to conform to society, it’s our failure to think the way others think, it’s our failure to subscribe to group dynamics and groupthink, it’s our failure to give in to peer pressure, it’s our failure to blindly follow tradition, it’s our failure to unquestioningly obey authority, and it’s our failure to accept the status quo that have driven human progress for tens of thousands of years, thanks to autistic individuals who successfully resisted attempts at being mainstreamed.'

In conclusion, I consider autism (as well as related neurological orientations such as ADHD) to be a social construct describing people who exceed the level of individuality tolerated by society and argue that our 'autism level' depends on the amount of pressure put on us not to be ourselves and the degree of our resistance to that pressure. It is no coincidence that autism was first pathologised in Nazi-occupied Austria and the United States in the early 1940s, in countries and at a time that saw the ruthless enforcement of conformity and compliance and the perception of individual expression as an act of treason or a sign of mental illness. And the more the world slides back into authoritarianism, the more people will be diagnosed with autism.

Throughout history, those who changed the world for the better lived through a lifetime of struggle, opposition and discrimination for their refusal to uncritically conform and comply. It is time to make it easier for them; let's begin with their childhoods.

The Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis merges and elaborates on The Deindividuation Process and All Children Are Born Autistic which now redirect here. As I keep reflecting on society in general and the important role deindividuation resisters and exempts (i.e. autistic people) play in it, my thinking has evolved over the years and is likely to keep evolving in years to come. Therefore the hypothesis may be expanded, amended or otherwise edited in the future.

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My children's story Flinn Elf Grows Up is based on this hypothesis.

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The first time the hypothesis was mentioned in academia (or anywhere, for that matter) was in the paper Autistic traits, prototypes, phenotypes, spectrum, and identities: reevaluating autism with G.E. Sukhareva (Rebecchi, 2025): 'These trends prompt reflection on labeling’s societal role. Does it reveal more about exclusionary capitalist systems than autism itself? Autism may increasingly function as a "social identity" shaped by societal classifications, rather than a neurobiological condition. Psychiatry’s focus on social impairments reinforces deindividuation (Ludwig, 2022), where group identities override individuality, fostering stigmatization.'

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List of Selected Studies and Experiments Supporting Aspects of the Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis (AI-generated):

Study: Effects of Group Pressure on the Modification and Distortion of Judgments (Asch, 1951)
Focus: Conformity in groups
Key Findings: Participants often gave wrong answers to match a unanimous group’s incorrect answer. About 75% conformed at least once.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Illustrates strong peer pressure to conform; trusting one’s own perception is rare under social pressure.

Study: Behavioral Study of Obedience (Milgram, 1963)
Focus: Obedience to authority
Key Findings: 65% of adults obeyed orders to administer maximal electric shocks to a stranger. Many showed extreme distress but still complied.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Demonstrates people will suppress personal morals under authority - extreme case of compliance (deindividuation into agent of authority).

Experiment: Creativity Test (Land & Jarman, 1968; follow-ups 1973, 1978; adults 1985)
Focus: Longitudinal divergent thinking/creativity across ages
Key Findings: Using the same creativity test first built for NASA, of 1,600 children (ages 3-5) tested, 98% scored in the 'highly creative' range; retested at age 10, 30%; at age 15, 12%; as adults, 2%.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Supports the claim that social conditioning/schooling coincides with sharp declines in originality, consistent with a deindividuation process that narrows thinking toward group norms; 'resisters' retain higher divergent thinking.

Study: Neurobiological correlates of social conformity and independence during mental rotation (Berns et al., 2005)
Focus: fMRI of conformity vs. independence
Key Findings: Conforming with group activated visual perception regions, suggesting group opinions altered perception; nonconformity (going against group) triggered heightened amygdala activity (fear/stress of standing alone).
Relevance to Hypothesis: Biological evidence that agreeing with the group can change even low-level processing, while disagreeing is emotionally salient ('social pain'). Supports the idea that resisting group influence is inherently difficult.

Study: Insensitivity to social reputation in autism (Izuma et al., 2011)
Focus: Social reward in autism
Key Findings: Neurotypical adults donated more money when watched (to improve reputation), but autistic adults were unaffected by being observed. Autistic group showed no concern for social reputation in behaviour.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Autistic people are less motivated by social approval, a core aspect of resisting conformity. They don’t alter behaviour for acceptance, aligning with the hypothesis that they retain individuality instead of adapting to please observers.

Study: A longitudinal examination of the fourth grade slump (Torrance, 1968)
Focus: Creativity development ('4th-grade slump')
Key Findings: Divergent thinking ability in children showed a significant decline around ages 9–10, coinciding with transition to more structured schooling. Torrance attributed this slump to increased pressures to conform to rules and peer norms in school.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Suggests that standard educational/social environments in mid-childhood dampen originality - exactly when social conditioning intensifies. The few children who don’t experience as much decline might be those less affected by conformity pressure (potential 'resisters').

Study: A Reexamination of Brainstorming Research: Implications for Research and Practice (Taylor et al., 1958)
Focus: Group brainstorming vs. individual creativity
Key Findings: Found that groups brainstorming together generated fewer unique ideas than the same number of individuals brainstorming alone. Group interaction inhibited some creative thoughts (due to conformity, production blocking, etc.).
Relevance to Hypothesis: An example of how group settings can suppress individual creativity and critical thinking – supporting the hypothesis that group influence tends to constrain thinking within accepted norms ('group member thinking stays within parameters').

Study: The Social Motivation Theory of Autism (Chevallier et al., 2012)
Focus: Social motivation in autism
Key Findings: Proposed that autism involves a deficit in the brain’s reward response to social stimuli. Autistics have less drive to seek social engagement due to different orbitofrontal-striatum-amygdala network function. Empirical support from multiple studies of reduced social orienting and reward in autism.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Provides a theoretical framework and evidence for why autistic individuals might naturally resist group socialization: if they don’t feel the normal reward of fitting in, they won’t be as compelled to conform. It’s a neurobiological explanation for the 'resister' trait.

Study: The Role of Rejection Sensitivity and Relational Victimization Within the Friendship Group on Conformity Intentions (Predix et al., 2025)
Focus: Children’s fear of rejection and conformity
Key Findings: Among 4th–5th graders, those anxious about rejection conformed more to peer academic and behaviour norms, while those who expected rejection anyway were less likely to conform or follow trends. Rejection-sensitive kids either ingratiated or withdrew/defied.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Shows a split in children’s adaptation to social pressure: most try to fit in to avoid rejection, but a subset essentially gives up on fitting in and behaves independently. The latter group mirrors the concept of children who do not succumb to social conditioning (at least in certain domains) - akin to young 'resisters'.

Survey: Unschooling Survey (Gray, 2012)
Focus: Outcomes of children with minimal enforced conformity (unschooling)
Key Findings: Parents reported unschooled children were happier, more self-confident, and showed blossoming creativity and intrinsic desire to learn. They noted benefits like children being themselves and thinking outside the box, free from school’s peer pressure and strict schedules.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Real-world evidence that reducing authoritarian/social pressures on children can yield individuals who maintain their individuality and creativity. It supports the idea that many traits labelled problematic in school (questioning authority, single-minded interests) are not inherently pathologies – they can be positives in a conducive environment.

Study: A General Principle of Neuronal Evolution Reveals a Human-Accelerated Neuron Type Potentially Underlying the High Prevalence of Autism in Humans (Starr, A. L. & Fraser, H. B, 2025).
Focus: Evolutionary neurogenetics; origin of autism as a by-product of human intelligence
Key Findings: Cross-species transcriptomic analysis revealed that the most abundant cortical neuron type in humans (layer 2/3 intratelencephalic neurons) evolved unusually rapidly, showing selective down-regulation of autism-associated genes. These shifts indicate polygenic positive selection linked to the rise of advanced human cognition, implying that the same neuronal innovations increasing intelligence also heightened autism susceptibility.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Demonstrates that autism-related neurobiology is not a pathology but an inherent evolutionary trade-off within human brain development, supporting the DRH view that 'deindividuation resisters' represent a biologically rooted minority essential to the evolution of independent thought and resistance to social conformity.

Study: Young Children Conform More to Norms Than Preferences (Li et al., 2021)
Focus: Behavioural experiment with 3 1/2-year-old children (N = 104), observing whether they follow conventional/normative actions vs. idiosyncratic ones.
Key Findings: Even toddlers show a tendency to act conventionally (i.e. perform actions that match group norms), beyond just wanting to please an adult.
Relevance to Hypothesis: This points to an early, intrinsic motive to conform to group norms from a young age. It supports the hypothesis' assumption that deindividuation starts early (i.e. children internalize group norms). Those who resist this early pull would be unusual.

Study: Young Children’s Affective Responses to Acceptance and Rejection (Howarth et al., 2013)
Focus: Experimental task giving children evaluative feedback (acceptance or rejection) from peers
Key Findings: Children showed clear affective (emotional) responses to being accepted vs rejected by peers, even at young ages.
Relevance to Hypothesis: This supports the idea that social approval/disapproval is psychologically salient early in development. The emotional salience of being accepted or rejected is one of the forces pushing toward conformity/deindividuation.

Study: Social reward network connectivity differs in autism (Xie et al., 2023)
Focus: fMRI / network connectivity study of social reward circuitry in autistic vs. neurotypical individuals
Key Findings: The connectivity and function of social-reward networks differ in autistic participants, consistent with altered sensitivity to social reward.
Relevance to Hypothesis: This supports the idea that autistic individuals may not derive the same reward from social approval or group belonging, reducing the incentive to conform. It provides a neural substrate for resisting social influence.

Study: Social Conformity and Autism (Yafai et al., 2014)
Focus: Child-friendly version of Asch's line-judgment task with autistic children vs. matched typical children
Key Findings: Autistic children were much less likely to conform in the misleading condition (i.e. when the majority gave an incorrect answer). Autism trait scores negatively correlated with conformity in the control group.
Relevance to Hypothesis: This is a direct empirical test showing that autistic children resist peer pressure in a simple perceptual task. It aligns with the idea that autistic individuals may retain more individuality (less deindividuation) in social situations.

Study: Key social reward circuit in the brain impaired in kids with autism (Stanford MRI study, Supekar et al., 2018)
Focus: MRI structural & functional imaging of mesolimbic reward pathway in autistic children (ages 8-13)
Key Findings: Autistic children showed reduced density and functional connectivity in neural circuits associated with reward. Deficits in this circuit correlated with more perceived severe social impairments.
Relevance to Hypothesis: This supports the Social Motivation Theory and links nicely with the hypothesis: if social reward circuitry is weaker in autistic individuals, then the pull to conform or please socially is diminished, making resistance more plausible.

Study: Five levels of self-awareness as they unfold early in life (Rochat, 2013)
Focus: Developmental psychology – self-awareness in infancy
Key Findings: Infants display implicit self-awareness within the first months of life, distinguishing self-caused from other-caused events even before mirror recognition.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Confirms that humans begin life with individual identity, supporting the claim that individuality precedes social conditioning.

Study: Three-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-race faces (Kelly et al., 2005)
Focus: Early perceptual bias and racial preference
Key Findings: Newborns show no racial preference, but by 3 months prefer faces of their own ethnicity, driven purely by exposure.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Demonstrates that group identification develops through experience, not innate bias, aligning with the idea that collective identity is learned.

Study: Consequences of minimal group affiliations in children (Dunham, Baron & Carey, 2011)
Focus: Experimental social psychology - minimal group paradigm
Key Findings: Children arbitrarily assigned to colour-coded groups rapidly showed ingroup favouritism and exclusion of others.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Shows that even meaningless group assignments create collective identity, echoing the hypothesis’ view that belonging itself triggers deindividuation.

Study: Evidence of increased PTSD symptoms in autistics exposed to ABA (Kupferstein, 2018)
Focus: Trauma outcomes of behavioral therapy
Key Findings: Autistic adults previously subjected to Applied Behavior Analysis reported PTSD symptoms at nearly twice the rate of unexposed peers.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Supports the claim that attempts to force conformity and suppress individuality cause psychological trauma in resisters.

Study: Suicidality in Autistic Spectrum Disorders (Zahid & Upthegrove, 2017)
Focus: Clinical psychiatry – suicide risk
Key Findings: Autistic individuals have markedly higher suicide ideation and attempts, particularly when socially isolated or unsupported.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Demonstrates the mental-health cost of ostracisation and chronic rejection of deindividuation resisters.

Study: Loss of mTOR-dependent autophagy causes autistic-like synaptic pruning deficits (Tang et al., 2014)
Focus: Neuroscience – cortical development
Key Findings: Post-mortem analysis found autistic brains had pruned only ~16 % of synapses by late childhood versus ~50 % in controls; linked to mTOR overactivity.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Provides a biological basis for incomplete pruning, supporting the idea that resisters retain broader neural connectivity enabling independent thought.

Study: Reduced habituation in children with autism (Weng et al., 2020)
Focus: fMRI of sensory processing
Key Findings: Autistic children showed reduced neural habituation to repeated social stimuli such as faces and voices.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Explains hypersensitivity and persistence of novelty perception in resisters who retain unused neural pathways rather than adapting to group patterns.

Study: Self and other in the human brain (DiNicola & Buckner, 2021)
Focus: Cognitive neuroscience – self/other representation
Key Findings: The default-mode network mediates self-referential and moral reasoning; stronger self-referential activity correlates with reduced external influence.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Neural evidence that high self-awareness supports rational, unbiased independence, key traits of deindividuation resisters.

Study: Moral flexibility: Social and neural accounts of incorruptibility (FeldmanHall & Shenhav, 2021)
Focus: Social neuroscience – moral consistency under pressure
Key Findings: Some individuals maintain stable moral judgments despite social or contextual pressure, linked to consistent vmPFC-TPJ activation.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Empirical support for incorruptibility and moral steadfastness amid social influence - hallmarks of the hypothesis’ resisters.

Paper: Procyshyn, T. L., Tsompanidis, A., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2024) - Embracing evolutionary theories of autism: Implications for psychiatry
Focus: Presents an overview of evolutionary psychiatry’s application to autism, proposing that autistic traits represent adaptive specialisations rather than pathologies
Key Findings: Argues that autism reflects an evolved cognitive specialisation characterised by strong systemizing and reduced social conformity, maintained by positive selection for innovation-related traits.
Relevance to Hypothesis: Supports the DRH by showing that resistance to social conditioning (the maintenance of individual cognition and behaviour despite social pressure) may have deep evolutionary roots. Autistic cognition exemplifies an evolutionarily preserved form of individuality that resists assimilation into collective behavioural norms.

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The DRH must be the most-ignored autism-related hypothesis. While I understand that mainstream people dismiss it due to its (necessary) criticism of collective identities (such as religion) and their collective biases, and possibly my lack of formal credentials, it has been shared by a few dozen other autistic people on Facebook who are just as unconnected as I am. Interestingly, nobody yet has argued against it; in contrast, my related Autistic Neanderthal Theory (How Neanderthal Assimilation Created Modern Humans) was intensely debated before it fell into oblivion. Influential autism advocates won't touch the DRH with a barge pole, I imagine for fear of alienating mainstream allies.
I have submitted it to journals and conferences and suggested it for podcasts, but in most cases I didn't even get a reply. Therefore I am willing to offer €100 to anybody who agrees with the DRH (or even just finds it worth discussing) and manages to reach a wider audience than I do.

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