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.
Key Takeaways
- Social Roles: Positions such as parent, teacher, or employee carry expected behaviors that people tend to adopt once they step into them.
- Roles vs Norms: Norms are general rules that apply to everyone in a group; roles are narrower expectations tied to one specific position.
- Role Theory: Linton, Mead, and Goffman described how positions shape behavior decades before Zimbardo’s famous prison study.
- Stanford Prison Study: Zimbardo (1973) found that ordinary volunteers quickly became abusive guards or passive prisoners once assigned those roles.
- Modern Reappraisal: Archival research by Le Texier (2019) found the guards were coached to be tough. A BBC-filmed replication with no coaching found no cruelty at all.
- Not Automatic: Even in the original study, only about a third of guards behaved brutally, so role-conformity depends on more than the role label alone.
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. People perform roles for an audience, using props, costumes, and a shared script, in what he called impression management.
Later, Bruce Biddle (1986) pulled these threads together, showing that role theory is really a family of related ideas rather than one single mechanism.
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.
Aim: Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo (1973) tested whether prison brutality comes from disposition or from the role and setting itself, by randomly assigning ordinary volunteers to prisoner and guard roles.
Method: Twenty-four male students, screened for stability, were randomly allocated to prisoner or guard in a mock prison built at Stanford.
Guards wore uniforms and mirrored sunglasses; prisoners were arrested, stripped, and addressed only by number.
Results: Both groups adopted their roles within days. Guards grew increasingly abusive, five prisoners were released early in severe distress, and the study stopped after six days instead of the planned two weeks.
Conclusion: Zimbardo argued that random allocation ruled out disposition, so the guards’ cruelty and the prisoners’ breakdowns must reflect the power of the roles themselves.
Contemporary Research
The SPE’s reputation has changed sharply since 2015.
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 had briefed them beforehand 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.
Le Texier (2019) concluded the SPE should be debunked as clean evidence of spontaneous role-conformity.
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.
It depends on instruction, self-selection, and group identification, not the role label alone.
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.
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
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
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.
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
Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. Random House.
