Role Playing-Needlepointing

Role Playing is an interesting concept, but anyone who has acted knows how absorbing a role can become and how real a non-real experience can feel.

For example take Patty Hearst, she was a wealthy college student from California who was kidnapped by a revolutionary group and a few months later she was arrested as a member of the group who kidnap her. Patty Hearst in playing the role her captors wanted her to play, had actually become Tania, a gun-toting revolutionary (Kassin et al., 2011).

Patty herself describes the whole entire concept of role playing: “I had thought I was humoring my captors by parroting their clichés and buzzwords without believing in them….In trying to convince them I convinced myself” (Hearst, 1982).

Attitude changes in general persist more when they are encouraged by the individual’s behavior rather than when it comes from a weak or passive persuasive communication (Janis, 1968).

Irving Janis conducted a study to see what would change the participants’ view or opinion of a specific topic. One group of participants had to listen to a speech that challenged their view while another group of participants were given an outline and were told to give a speech that went against their view/opinion. The participants who had to give the speech themselves has changed their attitudes more than the group of participants that only listened to speech (Janis & King, 1954).

Role playing according to Irving Janis has the ability to change people’s attitudes, because the people are forced to learn the message. 

Reasons behind this are because people are more likely to remember an argument they themselves came up with, rather than an argument they heard someone telling them and Another it is so easy for people to mix up what they say and or do with what they think and ‘actually’ believe.  Another reason is also the idea of the whole entire idea of “saying is believing” (Higgins & Rholes, 1978; Slamecka & Graff, 1978).

We all know attitudes influence our behavior, but as role playing has shown, our behavior can have the same kind of effect on our attitudes.

My Personal Example: Needlepoint 

Needlepoint: Embroidery worked over a canvas.

Example: A pillow my mother made.
 

My mother since I can remember has needlepointed and has always had a strong love for it. I on the other hand h

ave probably detested and despised needlepoint just as long as my mom has done it. It didn’t help that my mom wanted me to needlepoint and I had to take classes for it. It also didn’t help that I have horrible hand/eye coordination, meaning that needlepointing for me was beyond difficult and frustrating. 

For as long as I can remember I have had a strong and very vocal negative opinion about needlepointing.

It wasn’t until I started working at my mom’s needlepoint store for the summer before I started college that things began to change. Toward the middle of the summer I was given more responsibility and I had to work up at front and at times I was the only one in the shop.

When customers came and ask me a question, I couldn’t be an angry 17 year old who worked at her mother’s shop which she detested. I had to act as someone who genuinely liked needlepoint and was an 'expert' on it. I had to sell things to people and show them how awesome needlepointing was, what the best type of thread was, the right kind of canvas to use, ect. 

At first I was acting; pretending to be interested in something I could have cared less about and to be honest I was only parroting years and years of needlepoint information I had obtained unwilling from my mother and the previous two months of working at the store. I was saying what I thought my mom would say or what I thought would make a specific customer like something more and buy something.

It wasn’t much later until I started genuinely helping out customers and actually caring what threads they picked out or what canvas they picked. I even tried to sale my friends on needlepoint and try to convince them it was something they should try. I hadn’t even notice I had become this person I was pretending to be.

Even now my opinion of needlepoint is still overall positive. I still don’t do it and I have no talent in it, but when I see someone who needlepoints and likes to needlepoint I can talk to them. I’m genuinely proud of my mom’s old needlepoint store and all off the stuff my mom makes. I even get defensive of needlepoint when people compare or say it’s knitting or crocheting. 

I never even noticed the change from me pretending/acting that I liked needlepoint to where I did actually like it. 

Wordcount-802

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

References

Hearst, P. C. (1982). Every secret thing. New York: Doubleday.

Higgins, E. T., & Rholes, W. S. (1978). “Saying is believing”: Effects of message modification on memory and liking for the person described. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14, 363-378.

Janis, I. L. (1968). Attitude change via role playing. In R. Abelson, E. Aronson, W. McGuire, T. Newcomb, M. Rosenberg, & P. Tennenbaum (Eds). Theories of consistency: A sourcebook (pp. 810-818). Chicago: Rand McNally. 

Janis, I. L., & King, B. T. (1954). The influence of roleplaying on opinion change. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 211-218. 

Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. F. (2011). Attitudes: Persuasion by our own actions. Social Psychology, 8, 81-83. 

Slamecka, N. J., & Graff, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 592-604.

Attitudes

An Attitude is an individual’s positive, negative, or mixed reaction to another person, an object, or an idea. Everyone has attitudes; lifestyle choices or beliefs, political affiliation, health choices, TV shows/movies, and what brands we use in our everyday life. An individual’s self-esteem is an attitude that they have about themselves, an attraction is a positive attitude toward another person, and prejudice is a negative toward another person, and so forth (Albarracin, Johnson, & Zanna, 2005; Crano & Prislin, 2008; Fazio & Petty, 2008).

People’s attitudes can’t be expressed simply as either loving something or hating something. Attitudes can vary in the intensity or strength of the individual; people can react positively or negatively, people can also react with ambivalence (having strong, but mixed emotions), and or with indifference (Cacioppo et al., 1997). Individuals differ in the extent to which they tend to stimuli whether they generally have strong reactions or low reactions (Bizer et al., 2004; Jarvis & Petty, 1996).

Everyone, no matter who they are routinely forms attitudes toward people, places, objects, and ideas that they encounter in their daily lives. This can’t be help as it tends to be an automatic process; like a reflex (Bargh et al., 1996; Cunningham et al., 2003; Duckworth et al., 2002; Ferguson, 2007).

Attitudes are part of daily life and are unavoidable, but they can also be useful as they enable people to judge quickly and with little thought (Maio & Olson, 2000).

Preexisting attitudes exist for everyone and they can cause some issues. They can cause people to become close-minded, bias in the way they interpret and process new information, and make people more resistant to change (Fazio et al., 2000). 

Personal Example: Diet Coke

Everyone has a strong preference for a brand, whether it be clothing, computer, cellphone, food, or ect. There is that one brand named item, that despite what the statistics may show us, people tell us, and or what the commercials try to sell, we firmly believe that our brand name is the best and we will choose it without a doubt.

While most people don’t feel strongly about every brand item they use, there will be always that one despite other brands or generic versions being just as good.

People may prefer Religion Jeans, Old Navy, Mac, Nike, Burger King, Snapple, Honda, or Coca Cola to whatever else.  

For me personally I am a Diet Coke person. I grew up on it and most of my family drinks it. I have a very strong positive reaction toward Diet Coke in comparison to what I feel as is a moderately negate reaction toward Diet Pepsi. Despite the fact that people tell me they taste the same and there is no difference, I will always choose Diet Coke. It taste better in my opinion, but at the same time I could fabricate the taste in my head to reason my irrational preference. 

I will admit that in a restaurant I will have a Diet Pepsi if I have to. But recently I’ve realized how dedicate I am to getting Diet Coke. 

My parents live in Arizona, so I travel a lot by plane, and because of that I spend a lot of time at airports. In my last recent trips I have notice that most of the restaurants, convenient stores, and even vending machines are Pepsi affiliated. In fact the Airports that I frequent (Texas and Arizona) there seems to be only one type of restaurant that has my Diet Coke. That restaurant is McDonald’s and to be frank McDonald’s is far from my favorite place to eat, but I have (multiple times) walk and extra 15 to 20 minutes in a busy airport to go to McDonalds so I can get a Diet Coke. Despite the fact that there are tons of other places in the airport that are always much closer and have a similar drink.

My preference for Diet Coke or my preexisting attitude towards Diet Coke makes me bias toward Coco Cola, close minded about Pepsi, and to put it frankly unreasonably stubborn at times.

Word Count-682

 ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

References

Albarracin, D., Johnson, B. T., & Zanna, M. P. (Eds). (2005). The hand-book of attitudes. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bargh, J. A, Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.
Bizer, G., Krosnick, J., Holbrock, A., Wheller. S., Rucker, D., & Petty, R. E. (2004). The impact of personality on cognitive, behavioral, and affective political processes: The effects of need to evaluate. Journal of Personality, 72, 995-1027.
Cacioppo, J. T., Gardner, W. L., & Bernston, G. G. (1997). Beyond bipolar conceptualizations and measures: The case of attitudes and evaluative space. Personality and Social Psychology Review, I, 3-35.
Crano, W. D., & Prislin, R. (Eds). (2008). Attitudes and attitude change. New York: Psychological Press.
Cunningham, W. A., Johnson, M. K., Gatenby, J. C., Gore, J. C, & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Separable neural components in the processing of black and white faces. Psychological Science, 15, 806-813.

 Duckworth, K. K., Bargh, J. A., Garcia, M., & Chaiken, S. (2002). The automatic evaluation of novel stimuli. Psychological Science, 13, 513-519.

 Fazio, R. H., Ledbetter, J. E., & Towles-Schwen, T. (2000). On the costs of accessible attitudes: Detecting that the attitude object has changed. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 197-210.

Fazio, R. H., & Petty, R., E., (Eds). (2008). Attitudes: Their structure, function, and consequences. New York: Psychology Press.

Ferguson, M. (2007).  On the automatic evaluation of end-states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92-596-611.

Jarvis, W. B. G., & Petty, R. E. (1996).The needs to evaluate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7, 172-194.
Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. F. (2011). Attitudes: The study of attitudes. Social Psychology, 8, 81-83.
Maio, G., & Olson, J., M. (Eds). (2000).Why we evaluate. Function of attitudes, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.