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. 

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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.