Role Playing and Obedience

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Why Role playing and Obedience facktors are so powerful?

-- Olena Zolochevska (olenazolo@prodigy.net), April 30, 2001

Answers

Although your question is a little sparse and vague, I am assuming that your are asking a similar question about role playing and obedience ,ie why is each of them a powerful source of influence or mechanism for change.Let's look at each in turn: Role-playing refers to the situation in which a person acts as if he or she were a different individual or in a manner inconsistent with one's actual beliefs .The more one is absorbed in a role or the greater the degree of emotional arousal involved,the greater the likelihood that role-playing is going to serve as a catalyst for change.A prime example is an experiment by Janis and Mann ( J of Exp Res in Pers,1965)in which female college students who were cigarette smokers were instructed to engage in an emotional role-play in which she was to act the role of a patient who had been informed by her doctor (played by the experimenter) that her lung X-ray shows a malignancy.The main result was that these subject showed a drastic drop in their rate of smoking ( a 50% drop,as I recall).One explanation for the powerful impact of emotional role-playing is that the direct, visceral immersion provided by it makes it virtually impossible to deny or defend oneself against the disturbing message embodied in the role-play. Obedience:The most powerful demonstration of obedience is,of course, Milgram's program of experimental research on obedience to apparently destructive orders of an authority. In his main experiments he showed that 65% percent of his participants,normal adults from New hven and Bridgeport,were willing to continue to inflict electric shock up to the maximum of 450 volts at the bidding of the experimenter,who had no coercive means to enforce his commands. According to Milgram two mediating mechanisms make such drastic obedience possible: 1)A relinquishing of resposibilty for one's actions to the legitinate authority--the experimenter.Milgram refers to this process as entry into "an agentic state".Once this shift in responsibilty takes place the person cedes judgements about the morality of his actions to the authority,his main concern being how well he does his job. 2) Acceptance of the authority's definition of the situation or reality,which Milgram refers to as "control of one's perceptions". One of the important controversies in the history of modern social psychology was the role-playing vs deception controversy which raged in the 1960s and 70s .Some rsearchers,eg Mixon suggested role-playing as an ethically benign alternative the laboratory experiment,which often involved deception.Others,eg Freedman contended that role-playing could never be an adequate substitute for the laboratory experiment and the genuine behavioral outcomes it provides.Ironically,one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of role-playing as an effective alternative for the deception experiment was a roled-played version of the Milgram obedience experiment conducted by Geller for a doctoral dissertation chaired by Milgram (Geller,JPSP,1968).Geller found resluts very similar to Milgram,especially among the subjects who were most deeply absorbed in their role.(By the way,Geller used Milgram's machine and was the only one of all his doctoral students to do an obedience experiment.Milgram's mentoring style--modelled after his own mentor and dissertation chairman ,Gordon Allport-- was to let his students be themselves and follow their own interests. For more information about Milgram,including relevant refernces see my website www.stanleymilgram.com . Thomas Blass

-- Thomas Blass (blass@umbc.edu), April 30, 2001.

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