Social Roles and Expectations

Many social psychologists subscribe to the belief that we take on and act out certain roles according to the expectations placed on us by our cultures and societies.

Social Roles

The roles we internalize, from mother to manager, are associated with certain expectations and norms of behavior. We have mental “scripts” or understandings about what behavior is appropriate in different settings, such as restaurants, lectures, wi-fi coffee houses, and more. These unconscious scripts powerfully influence the words we use, the way we view situations and other people, and even our emotional responses. Usually these scripts and roles facilitate social harmony, allowing us to understand what type of behavior is appropriate in a given situation. But we may also apply old scripts in new situations where they are not really right or appropriate.

The Stanford Prison Experiments (SPE)

In Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s landmark 1971 study, participants were 24 psychologically and physically healthy male college students, recruited from among 75 volunteers answering a newspaper ad. After completing a battery of personality scales and interviews, they were randomly assigned to play the role of either prison guard or prisoner in a projected two- week study on the power of situational influences. The experimenters created a total situation (prisoners played their roles around the clock) that promoted the depersonalization and deindividuation of the “prisoners,” and their dehumanization by the guards in that novel situation. It resulted in ever increasing abusive behavior on the part of the “guards.”  The experiment was canceled after only six days due to the psychological breakdown of five prisoners in response to the escalating aggression and power tactics of their guards. These findings illustrate just how far most people will go to carry out the responsibilities they perceive to be expected of them by their social roles.

Watch this video to learn more: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Connections between the SPE and Abu Ghraib

The results of the SPE demonstrate that it was not merely the behavior of a few “bad apples” that caused things to deteriorate so quickly in the situation, given that the participants were selected because they were normal and psychologically healthy.  Rather, it is the very nature of the social roles created within a prison environment that led to dehumanization, neglect, and abuse. In some situations, the “barrel” itself may be the thing that is bad, rotting the moral compass of some of those good “apples” inside. A modern parallel to the SPE can be seen in the recent prisoner abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison, in which U.S. Military Police prison guards, both male and female, were influenced by the power of the situation into performing acts similar to those of the guards in the SPE, but far worse to the point of torture, degradation and sexual humiliations over a 3-month duration in 2003.

Watch this video to learn more: Abu Ghraib: The Bad Barrel