Zimbardo's Societal Roles

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Societal roles- what are they? Societal roles are what makes people act the way they do. This can be in an authoritative way, or it could be in a more submissive way. While one’s roles in which society makes them who they are, it is authority of roles that actually does the enforcing. Scientists Phillip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram were able to prove that the roles placed on a person and the authority given to them from that role by another even more powerful person, affect how they treat others.
Phillip Zimbardo was a man who wondered why people tend to view others, like prison guards, as ruthless creatures. Zimbardo wanted to know if it was the prison environment or if it was just the guard’s personalities. To discover this, he conducted …show more content…
Discovering this took an experiment; this experiment took volunteers and named them teachers, and, since Milgram needed reliable results, he placed his own people as learners; the volunteers, however, did not know that the learners were in cahoots with Milgram; therefore, they would treat the learners however their authority figures told them to. During the experiment, the teacher would ask a series of question and for every wrong answer the leaner would experience an electric shock, however if the teacher refused to go on, then they would get encouragement from an authority figure to continue. The results of this experiment revealed that “65% (two-thirds) of the participants… [were willing to continue to] 450 volts [; however,] all of the participants continued to 300 volts” (Milgram Experiment). The authority figure in this experiment was, in fact, not the teacher, but rather the teacher’s encourager that told them to continue shocking the learners. In this case, the power came not from just roles, but also the obedience of a higher master. Even though it may not be as clear, the power of roles is still a large influence, as one can see, there are three levels of this power: encourager, teacher, and then learner. The encourager holds the highest level of …show more content…
That guiding hand of the authoritative man slowing but surely mold an entirely new submissive person from the previously strong minded personality. So, what are roles? Roles are how humans act typically until acted upon by an outside authoritative
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