Social Roles, Norms and Relationships, and Why Social Psychology Matters – Introduction to Social Psychology (Senior 6 Psychology (Languages)) | Ganzaa

Introduction to Social Psychology

Lessons

Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)

Introduction to Social Psychology

4 lessons

Lesson 4 of 4

Social Roles, Norms and Relationships, and Why Social Psychology Matters

25 min

Six days in a basement

In August 1971 the psychologist Philip Zimbardo turned a basement corridor at Stanford University in the United States into a mock prison. Male student volunteers, screened as psychologically healthy, were randomly assigned to be “guards” or “prisoners”. Within days some guards were humiliating prisoners and some prisoners showed severe distress. The study, planned for two weeks, was stopped after six days, after a graduate student, Christina Maslach, objected to what she saw. For decades textbooks used the Stanford Prison Experiment to argue that ordinary people slip into brutal behaviour simply because a role demands it.

That conclusion is now strongly disputed, and the reasons why teach as much as the study itself (see the evaluation below).

Definition

Social role: the set of behaviours expected of a person who holds a particular position in a group or society. Examples: teacher, prefect, older sibling, customer.

Role conflict: a situation in which two roles a person holds demand incompatible actions. Example: a prefect who sees a close friend breaking a school rule.

Social norm: a shared expectation about how people in a group should behave. A descriptive norm describes what most people actually do; an injunctive norm describes what most people approve or disapprove of.

Relationship: a lasting connection between people in which each affects the other’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour over time.

1. Roles: what the prison study really shows

Roles give us scripts. On the first day of a new job, or as a new prefect, you look around to see how people in that position behave. But the Stanford study is weak evidence that roles alone create cruelty:

Recordings and archive documents analysed by Thibault Le Texier (2019) show that the researchers briefed the guards, encouraged them to be tough, and told them what the study hoped to show. This creates strong demand characteristics: cues that tell participants how they are expected to behave.
Only about a third of the guards behaved cruelly; others were fair or even kind.
Zimbardo acted as the prison “superintendent” as well as the lead researcher, so he was not a neutral observer.
In the BBC Prison Study (2002), Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam set up a similar prison with careful ethical safeguards. The guards did not automatically become tyrannical; the prisoners built a strong shared identity and challenged them. What people did depended on whether they identified with their group, not simply on the label they were given.

The fair conclusion is that roles shape behaviour most strongly when people accept them, identify with them and are encouraged by leaders. That is a more useful lesson than “roles make people cruel”.

2. Norms: the rules nobody wrote down

Every group has norms: which language to use with whom, how to greet an elder, whether to arrive at a meeting on time. Some norms are written into law. In Rwanda, adults take part in umuganda, community work on the last Saturday of every month, which is both a legal duty and a strong social expectation in every village.

Descriptive norms can be used to change behaviour. In a 2008 field experiment by Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius, a hotel in the United States placed one of two cards in guest rooms. The standard card asked guests to reuse towels to help the environment; the other said that most guests reused their towels. About 35% of guests reused towels after the standard card and about 44% after the descriptive-norm card. However, when Gerd Bohner and Lena Schlüter (2014) ran the same idea in two German hotels, they found no clear effect. Norm messages work in some places and not others, probably depending on whether guests see the “most guests” as people like them.

3. Relationships: why we befriend the people we do

In 1950 Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back studied friendships among students’ families housed in Westgate West, a set of two-storey apartment buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Families were assigned flats by the university, not by choice, so this was a natural experiment.

Figure 1. Westgate West (Festinger, Schachter and Back, 1950): the closer two flats were, the more likely the families were to be friends.

Three findings recur in research on relationships:

Factor	Finding	Evidence
Proximity	We befriend people we meet often, such as neighbours and deskmates.	Westgate West (1950)
Mere exposure	Simply seeing someone often makes us like them more.	Moreland and Beach (1992): four women attended a university class 0, 5, 10 or 15 times without speaking; students rated those seen more often as more attractive.
Similarity	We like people whose attitudes, values and often language resemble ours.	Byrne (1971): strangers with similar attitudes were liked more.

4. Why social psychology matters in real life

Field	A question social psychology helps answer
Health	Will telling people that most of their neighbours sleep under mosquito nets increase net use?
Education	How should groups be formed so that every student, not just the confident ones, takes part?
Justice	Why are confident eyewitnesses sometimes wrong, and how should police line-ups be run?
Unity and reconciliation	Which kinds of contact between former opponents build trust rather than resentment?
Language learning	Why are some students willing to speak a new language in class while others with the same knowledge stay silent?
Work	How do team norms affect safety, honesty and productivity?

The prison study and the towel study also show why the field now insists on replication: repeating a study, ideally in another place and by other researchers, to see whether the result holds. A single striking study is a starting point, not a law of human nature.

National Geographic: “Unlocking the Truth About the Stanford Prison Experiment” (full episode). Watch for what former participants now say about how they were briefed and how much they were acting, and compare it with the study’s original claims.

Warning

Common mistake: quoting the Stanford Prison Experiment as proof that “anyone given power becomes cruel”. In an A-level answer, always add its weaknesses (demand characteristics, the researcher’s dual role, guards’ varied behaviour) and the contrasting BBC Prison Study.

Tip

Memory hook: “Descriptive = done; injunctive = judged.” A descriptive norm tells you what people do; an injunctive norm tells you what they judge right.

✦

Practice

Define a social role and give an example of role conflict from a student’s life.
Distinguish descriptive from injunctive norms, giving one example of each about language use at school.
Give two reasons why the Stanford Prison Experiment is weak evidence that roles alone cause cruelty.
How did the BBC Prison Study’s results differ from Zimbardo’s, and what did Reicher and Haslam say explained behaviour?
Why was Westgate West a natural experiment?
A school wants more students to speak English during break. Design a descriptive-norm message, and explain one reason it might fail.
Evaluate the claim: “One famous study is enough to establish how people behave.”

Show answersHide answers

The behaviours expected of someone in a particular position, such as a class monitor. Role conflict: a student who is both the debate captain and a sister must choose between attending her brother’s ceremony and the debate final on the same day.
Descriptive: “Most students in this school answer in English during lessons” (what they do). Injunctive: “Students here think it is rude to mock someone’s accent” (what they approve or disapprove of).
Any two: the guards were briefed and encouraged to be tough (demand characteristics); Zimbardo was both researcher and superintendent; only about a third of guards were cruel; it was a small, unrepresentative sample; a later study with safeguards found different results.
Guards did not automatically become tyrannical, and prisoners formed a shared identity and challenged them. Reicher and Haslam explained behaviour by social identity: people act on a role when they identify with their group.
The university assigned flats, so families did not choose their neighbours. Distance between flats therefore varied for reasons unrelated to who liked whom, which lets researchers link distance to friendship.
Example: a poster saying “Most S6 students here speak English at break at least once a day.” It may fail if students don’t believe it, if they don’t see the “most students” as people like them, or if a stronger injunctive norm (friends teasing English speakers) pushes the other way, as the German towel study suggests norm messages depend on context.
Not enough: famous single studies (the prison study, the towel study) have failed to replicate or have been reinterpreted. Results can depend on the sample, the place, the researchers’ expectations and chance. Confidence grows only when several independent studies, in different settings, agree.

1Six days in a basement

21. Roles: what the prison study really shows

32. Norms: the rules nobody wrote down

43. Relationships: why we befriend the people we do

54. Why social psychology matters in real life

Six days in a basement

1. Roles: what the prison study really shows

2. Norms: the rules nobody wrote down

3. Relationships: why we befriend the people we do

4. Why social psychology matters in real life