Social Roles

Social roles are the duties and behaviors attached to a specific position, such as parent, teacher, or employee. Social norms are the broader unwritten rules a community expects everyone to follow.

Both shape behavior by setting clear expectations for how people should act in a given situation, and these expectations vary from group to group.

Social Roles

One way these expectations become apparent is when we look at the roles people play in society.

Social roles refer to the behavior patterns expected of individuals in different situations and settings based on their specific position within a social unit. These roles come with rights, responsibilities, expectations, and social norms.

Examples include roles based on family (e.g., parent, sibling), occupation (e.g., teacher, doctor), or societal functions (e.g., leader, citizen).

Social roles structure our interactions and shape identity. The role itself does part of the work. This also keeps group behavior predictable.

Social roles are the part people play as members of a social group. With each social role you adopt, your behavior changes to fit the expectations both you and others have of that role.

In the words of William Shakespeare:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

These lines capture the essence of social roles.  Think of how many roles you play daily, e.g., son, daughter, sister, brother, student, worker, friend, etc.  Each social role carries expected behaviors called norms.

While social roles provide a framework for behavior, they can also be limiting. They can perpetuate stereotypes, hinder personal expression, and promote inequalities. For instance, rigid gender roles can limit opportunities and potentials for individuals.

The Origins of Role Theory

Role theory is older than Zimbardo’s experiment by decades.

Anthropologist Ralph Linton (1936) first separated status, the position a person holds, from role, what a person actually does because of it.

Philosopher George Herbert Mead (1934) added the psychological piece. Children learn who they are by rehearsing roles like parent, teacher, or doctor, and adults keep imagining how their actions look from someone else’s position.

Sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) said social life is theater in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. People perform roles for an audience, using props, costumes, and a shared script, in what he called impression management.

He later named something darker: the total institution.

In Asylums (Goffman, 1961), he described a setting such as a prison, hospital, or barracks whose whole design strips people of their old identity. Uniforms, numbers, and lost possessions remake them as incumbents of a new institutional role.

A mock prison built to this blueprint is arguably Zimbardo’s closest theoretical parent.

Later still, Bruce Biddle (1986) pulled these threads together. He showed that role theory is a family of related ideas, not one single mechanism. Biddle named four strands: roles as shared expectations, roles negotiated in interaction, roles as slots in a structure, and roles tied to a bounded organization.

Social Norms

Social norms are the unwritten rules of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that are considered acceptable in a particular social group or culture.

Norms provide us with an expected idea of how to behave and function to provide order and predictability in society. For example, we expect students to arrive at a lesson on time and complete their work.

Norms provide order in society. Human society could not function without them.

Humans need norms to guide behavior and make relationships predictable. They also help people interpret each other’s actions, which is why most people conform to social norms most of the time.

The idea of norms provides the key to understanding general social influence and conformity. Social norms are the accepted standards of behavior of social groups.

These groups range from friendship and workgroups to nation-states. Behavior that fulfills these norms is called conformity, and most of the time, roles and norms are powerful ways of understanding and predicting what people will do.

Examples of Social Norms

Norms are defining appropriate behavior for every social group. For example, students, neighbors, and patients in a hospital are all aware of the norms governing behavior. As individuals move from one group to another, their behavior changes accordingly.

These norms can vary widely between cultures, regions, and individual societies, and what’s considered normal or acceptable in one context may not be so in another.

• Greetings: Shaking hands when meeting someone in many Western cultures, while bowing is customary in countries like Japan.
• Dining: Using forks and knives for eating in Western societies, whereas chopsticks are used in many East Asian countries.
• Dress Code: Wearing formal attire in corporate settings, or covering one’s head in places of worship in certain religions.
• Queueing: Waiting in line for one’s turn, such as at a supermarket checkout or bus stop.
• Hygiene: Covering one’s mouth when coughing or sneezing.
• Punctuality: Being on time for appointments or meetings is expected in many cultures.
• Personal Space: Maintaining a certain distance when speaking to someone, with variations based on cultural norms.
• Public Behavior: Keeping voice volume down in public places like libraries or cinemas.
• Reciprocity: Sending a thank-you note after receiving a gift.
• Digital Etiquette: Not looking over someone’s shoulder while they’re on their phone or avoiding loud phone conversations in public transport.

Critical Evaluation

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Zimbardo’s study is the field’s most famous role-conformity demonstration.

Contemporary Research

The SPE’s reputation has changed sharply since 2015. Two connected reassessments, both published in 2019, now shape how psychologists read Zimbardo’s original findings.

Le Texier’s Archival Reappraisal (2019)

Thibault Le Texier examined Zimbardo’s original archive at Stanford, including orientation tapes, memos, and new interviews with participants and staff.

The guards were not left to invent their own cruelty.

Zimbardo and his warden briefed them beforehand. They were told to be tough and to create a sense of powerlessness in the prisoners.

Even the most notorious guard cruelty was, by that guard’s own later account, a calculated performance for the researchers.

Separately, Carnahan and McFarland (2007) found that volunteers who answered a “prison life” ad already scored higher on aggression and authoritarianism than volunteers for an ordinary study. The sample, not the role, may explain the cruelty.

Le Texier (2019) concluded the SPE should be debunked as clean evidence of spontaneous role-conformity.

A companion reanalysis of the same archive, by Haslam, Reicher, and Van Bavel (2019), reached a similar verdict. They studied audio recordings of Zimbardo’s orientation talks.

The guards, they argued, had been recruited into a shared identity that framed cruelty as service to a scientific mission. This identity leadership account treats the guards’ behavior as engaged followership, not blind conformity to a role label.

The BBC Prison Study (Reicher & Haslam, 2006)

Reicher and Haslam (2006) reran the same basic setup for a BBC documentary, but without coaching guards to be tough.

The guards did not turn tyrannical.

Prisoners instead grew a shared identity, gained confidence, and overturned the guards’ regime on day six.

The result fits social identity theory: tyranny depends on whether a group identifies together and accepts an authority as legitimate, not on the role label alone.

Role-conformity is real, but it is not automatic. Three rival accounts now compete to explain it:

• Situationism: the role and setting themselves produce the behavior, given powerful institutional cues like uniforms and anonymity.
• Social identity theory: conformity depends on whether people identify with the group and accept its authority as legitimate.
• Instructed-performance account: participants act out what they infer the researcher wants, from briefing, wording, and their own guesses.

No single account fully explains the SPE on its own.

Even in Zimbardo’s own later account, only about a third of the guards behaved brutally; the rest were tough but fair, or sympathetic to the prisoners.

Strengths and Limitations of Role-Conformity Research

Weighing the evidence together, four points stand out:

• A genuine theoretical contribution: role theory connects experimental psychology to a rich sociological tradition, and organizational and gender-role research supports it well beyond the SPE.
• The strong Zimbardo reading is now rejected: the archival, self-selection, and BBC evidence together show the causal work is done by identification, instruction, and legitimacy, not the role alone.
• Conformity was never universal: even in the original study, roughly a third of guards were brutal, a third were tough but fair, and a third were sympathetic.
• The evidence base is old and cannot be repeated: the SPE involved incomplete consent and real psychological harm, so today’s reinterpretation of the archival record is what current teaching rests on.

Role-conformity is also a distinct phenomenon from obedience. Milgram’s obedience experiments tested compliance with a direct command from an authority figure, not behavior shaped by an assigned position. The two are often taught together. They are not the same mechanism.

Role-conformity is strongest where a role is heavily stereotyped, where uniforms or an audience reinforce it, and where the person identifies with the group of role-holders. It is weaker where the role is ambiguous, newly assigned, or not accepted as legitimate.

Real-World Examples and Applications of Role Theory

Role-conformity is not confined to the SPE or the psychology laboratory. The same mechanism shows up wherever a position carries strong, culturally scripted expectations.

Even the reappraised SPE literature does not deny this. It only shows that more than a role label is required to produce the behavior.

Gender Roles and the Workplace

The largest everyday arena for role-conformity may be gender. Expectations about work, appearance and emotion attach to these positions. So does household labor, not biology alone.

Arlie Hochschild’s landmark study The Second Shift (Hochschild, 1989) traced this pattern into dual-career households. Even when both partners worked full time, women carried most of the unpaid domestic and childcare role, a pattern Hochschild called the “second shift.”

That gap has barely closed since.

A Western observer might attribute certain behavior to simply “being a man” or “being a woman.” A role-theoretic view says that behavior is cued by the position and its norms, not by biology alone. The position does the work, not the person.

See sex versus gender differences for the fuller distinction between biological and social explanations.

Role Theory in Institutions, Training and Therapy

Role-conformity is also harnessed in ordinary organizations, deliberately or not.

• Prison reform: Haney and Zimbardo (1998) argued that reforming prison culture means changing the role structure itself, not just screening staff.
• Organizational socialization: Van Maanen and Schein (1979) showed how new employees are inducted into a role through mentoring, ritual probation, and shared vocabulary.
• Classroom management: teacher training draws on the reciprocal “teacher” and “student” roles to shape classroom behavior on both sides.
• Therapeutic role-play: psychodrama and rehearsal exercises use the same pull toward a role as a deliberate, positive tool for behavior change.
• Military and police training: uniformed hierarchies carry the same role-based risks, which is why the SPE features in professional-ethics training on this exact danger.

None of this needs a mock prison; ordinary training and induction do the same work over months instead of days.

Abu Ghraib and the Situationist Thesis in the Wild

The 2003–2004 abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison became the most-cited real-world test of the SPE’s situationist reading.

Zimbardo served as an expert witness for an accused guard, arguing the abuse reflected a corrosive situation and command system, not a few bad actors (Zimbardo, 2007).

Reicher disagreed.

Reicher and colleagues countered that this account understates the role of identity. A shared sense of who the enemy was, and of what leaders seemed to permit, did real causal work of its own (Reicher, Haslam, & Rath, 2008).

Both readings hold some truth.

Abu Ghraib is where the dispute between situationism and social identity accounts stops being academic. The debate over which account is right is still very much alive in how militaries teach ethics today.

Conclusion

There is considerable pressure to conform to social roles. Social roles provide an example of social influence in general and conformity in particular.  Most of us, most of the time, conform to the guidelines provided by the roles we perform.

We conform to the expectations of others. We respond to their approval when we play our roles well and to their disapproval when we play our roles badly.

But how far will conformity go?  Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment illustrates the power of social roles in relation to conformity.

References

Biddle, B. J. (1986). Recent developments in role theory. Annual Review of Sociology, 12, 67–92. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.12.080186.000435

Carnahan, T., & McFarland, S. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(5), 603–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167206292689

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Anchor Books.

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews, 9, 1–17.

Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1998). The past and future of U.S. prison policy: Twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 53(7), 709–727. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.53.7.709

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 809–822. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000443

Hochschild, A. R., with Machung, A. (1989). The second shift: Working parents and the revolution at home. Viking Penguin.

Le Texier, T. (2019). Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 823–839. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401

Linton, R. (1936). The study of man: An introduction. Appleton-Century.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45(1), 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X48998

Reicher, S. D., Haslam, S. A., & Rath, R. (2008). Making a virtue of evil: A five-step social identity model of the development of collective hate. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(3), 1313–1344. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00113.x

Van Maanen, J., & Schein, E. H. (1979). Toward a theory of organizational socialization. In B. M. Staw (Ed.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 1, pp. 209–264). JAI Press.

Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. Random House.