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Psychology of Communication: social influence
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Psychology of Communication: social influence
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Within an existing social system, people are assigned to rôles. A given individual performs a specified set of behaviours and occupies a specific position. To some extent, these behaviours are performed by any person occupying that position regardless of who he is or what his personal characteristics are.
Berlo (1960)
You may already have read through the introductory section on social rôles. If so, you'll be quite familiar with the idea that social rôles always have a set of expectations associated with them. There will be variations in individual rôle performance, of course, but the actors will generally perform their rôle in conformity with the expectations. Indeed, in some cases, these rôle expectations may formally codified as rôle prescriptions, for example the set of formal rules governing what a goal-keeper may or may not do or laws requiring parents to care for their children, not beat them etc.
You and I play a variety of different rôles during the course of every day - daughter, car driver, pedestrian, customer, friend, student, club member etc. It's worth bearing in mind that we use the term 'rôle'; we talk about 'occupying' a rôle, rôle 'performance', 'what rôle do you play in all this?' etc. The sociologist Erving Goffman uses a whole series of terms taken from the theatre. He speaks of 'actors', 'performers', 'audiences', 'back-stage' self and 'front-stage' self (Goffman (1969)).
To study the rôles people play in prison situations, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. They advertised for students to play the rôles of prisoners and guards for a fortnight. Zimbardo selected the 21 applicants who seemed the healthiest, maturest and most 'normal'. At random 11 were assigned the rôle of 'guards', 10 the rôle of 'prisoners'.
The guards were given an official-looking uniform; the prisoners something like a prison uniform and toothbrush, towels and bedlinen. No personal belongings were allowed in the cells.
Zimbardo and the guards worked out a set of rules which prisoners were expected to memorise and follow. Prisoners were required to work to earn their $15 per day and were allowed prisoners twice per week, Guards were allowed to give certain rewards for good behaviour.
On the first day, the 'count' of the prisoners (carried out three times per day) took ten minutes. By the second day, the 'count' time had increased as the guards started to use it to harass the prisoners and by the fifth day the 'count' occupied several hours as the guards berated the prisoners for minor infractions of the rules.
Instead of protesting, some of the prisoners began to act in depressed, dependent ways, just like many real prisoners and inmates of institutions. They deteriorated into learned helplessness, becoming ever more surly and depressed. The more they acted in that way, the more they were mistreated. By the end of the sixth day, the situation had deteriorated to such an extent, with guards inventing new rules to make the prison regime more punitive, that Zimbardo called a halt.
The analysis of the results showed that the subjects simply 'became' the rôles they played. More than a third of the guards behaved in such a hostile manner consistently, that Zimbardo described their behaviour as sadistic. This was despite the fact that the rôles were assigned at random and there was absolutely no prior evidence that any of the subjects was inclined to behave as they did.
Zimbardo was so alarmed by the results of his experiment that he felt he had to go public on the results as soon as possible.He was roundly criticized in the popular media for having chosen a bunch of psychos fo his experiment, but he had in fact carefully screened every participant to ensure as well as he could that they were all normal. His experiment powerfully suggests that the mere assumption of a rôle is sufficient to cause a person to behave differently and, of course, that raises a number of questions about the assumption we are accustomed to making that people have an underlying, stable and invariant personality. To what extent are we ourselves and to what extent do we play a rôle others have written for us? Maybe that question is unanswerable (see the section on personality if you wish to follow that up). Certainly, we will almost all have experienced the surprising changes that people sometimes undergo when they assume a new rôle. The employees of British further education colleges have had the opportunity to observe such changes over the last three years or so. Were the principals of further education colleges always frustrated dictators who have now at last been unleashed to wreak their worst on their unsuspecting staff? Or have they all suddenly undergone a personality change? Or is it simply that they are now playing their assigned rôle of 'chief executive officers' in the Thatcherite free market economy? And what of the comradely, sometimes rather touchingly muddled, often rather tatty senior lecturers? Were they always unprincipled megalomaniacs under the surface? Or is there something in the cloth of the natty suits they now wear that has infected them with fascism? Or are they simply playing the rôle of members of the 'management team'?
Conformity
Diffusion of responsibility
Obedience
Rebellion
Minority influence
Conflict resolution
Groups and Teams
Mass Media Effects Research
Political Propaganda and Persuasion
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