LESSON ONE: SOCIAL FORCES

Lesson Overview

In this first lesson, you will be given several examples that illustrate the power of social forces to shape our behavior, and you will begin to see why sociologists put so much emphasis on the power of social situations. At the end of the lesson, you will be asked to apply a social forces analysis to the performance of young college graduates teaching in some of our nation's toughest schools.

Lesson Objectives

1. Understand the difference between experiment and participant-observation as sociological research methods.

2. Understand the ways in which assuming a new role has the power to transform our behavior and self-conception.

3. Begin to develop resistance to what sociologists term "the fundamental attribution error."

Reading and Viewing Assignment

First read the study notes for this lesson. Then watch the video, "Who Will Teach for America?" and complete Written Assignment #1. There is no reading assignment for this first lesson.

Study Notes

The real beginning point for sociology is the belief that as human beings, we are shaped in fundamental ways by our relationships with other people. The pressures and expectations generated by those relationships, which sociologists term social forces, are with us from birth to death, and have at least as much impact on our behavior as differences of biology or temperament.

One of the most powerful manifestations of social forces takes place when we assume a new position, whether it's our first day in kindergarten, our first time as a parent, or our entry into a new job. The set of expectations governing the behavior of a person holding a particular position in society is termed a role, and the circle of people whose expectations help to define that position is called the role set. Ordinarily our early experience of a given role has a tentative quality. We don't know what to expect and we don't know whether we will measure up. We may even have the sense of being impostors. But over time, our sense of self changes, as we assume a new identity and respond to the many expectations associated with our new position.

An exerience by my wife provides a good illustration. Joan was newly enrolled in a program of Clinical and Pastoral Education(CPE) at a local hospital. As an apprentice chaplain, she was expected to cover her share of "on calls" -- evenings and weekends when she would carry the beeper and respond to deaths and other emergencies requiring the services of a chaplain. Her first two nights on call passed uneventfully, but the third night made up for first two. Auto accidents, a snowmobile accident, a rape/attempted murder, three deaths -- and Joan was expected to comfort victims and families and be the bridge between patients, families, and medical staff in the emergency room. Her name tag didn't say "third-week student with many doubts, who doesn't know much yet, and you shouldn't expect her to be an expert;" it said "Chaplain Joan Mork," and chaplain she was expected to be.

In this case, the new role is experienced as empowering, and in fact Joan functioned as a chaplain, despite her private doubts and concerns. Take away the position as chaplain, symbolized by the name tag, and we just can't imagine anyone managing to function effectively in that setting after only a few weeks of training. But add the position, and the role expectations that surround it, and you have a completely different set of social forces at work. You may still experience many doubts and feel you aren't the person you are expected to be, but the power of the social situation is on your side. Extend this experience through the weeks and months; combine the repeated role expectations with certain personal qualities; and you have the recipe for producing a chaplain. By the third unit of CPE, sixth months after the experience described above, Joan was a chaplain even in her own eyes, handling the many crises and tragedies of hospital life with compassion and aplomb.

THE ZIMBARDO PRISON SIMULATION

In sociology, your own experience or the experience of your friends, is a good beginning point but is never enough. We are looking for broader rules ("generalizations") that apply to many similar situations. In other words, we want to be able to say something that is true not only of Joan's experience as a chaplain-apprentice and not only true of all the other chaplains-in-training in hospitals all over the country, but something that is true of the more general experience of taking on a new role assignment.

For the purpose of that sort of generalization, research is required, and one of the forms that research may take is the experiment. Under controlled conditions, subjects who have been randomly assigned to various treatments are closely observed, as the researcher exposes them to a particular social situation being created in the laboratory.

Philip Zimbardo's experiment with a simulated prison at Stanford University in the early 1970s was a striking demonstration of the power of the situation, and of social roles, to create dramatic changes in human behavior. It also demonstrates that not all role behavior is empowering; a new role can produce behavior that is more negative than anything we would have expected.

Zimbardo was interested in prison behavior. Until his experiment, most observers attributed the grim realities of prison life primarily to the sorting out process which identified the most vicious and irresponsible elements in our communities for tenure as prisoners. Some people also argued that the kinds of people who were attracted to careers as prison guards were people who took special pleasure in exercising power over others.

Zimbardo's hypothesis was that prison behavior, both by guards and prisoners, had more to do with the social forces in a prison than with the character and personality of its inhabitants. He needed a prison, in other words, where the roles of prisoner and guard could be enacted by relatively "normal" people, to see how they treated one another. He decided to create a simulated prison at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, and populate it with young college men on summer break.

He therefore recruited a group of two dozen young men who were willing, for pay, to devote two weeks of their summer to his experiment. They were mature, emotionally stable, college students (he did psychological screening), and part of the group was randomly assigned to be prisoners, while the other half became the guards. (This random assignment is an essential part of experimental methodology; without random assignment, people who liked to give orders could have chosen the guard role, and we'd have no way to sort out the impact of social forces from the impact of personality and character.)

Guards were given a brief indoctrination, stressing the need to maintain control. They were issued khaki uniforms, reflecting sunglasses, whistles, handcuffs and keys, and they worked one 8-hour shift per day. The expectation was that they would make up their own formal rules for maintaining law, order, and respect, and in fact, they generally had little or no difficulty in deciding how to proceed. Apparently we are most of us exposed to the basics of the "guard role" through the mass media of news and entertainment.

Prisoners were unexpectedly picked up at their houses by a Palo Alto police officer, booked at the local police station, and taken to "prison" in the basement of a classroom building at Standford University. They were assigned numbers, which were worn on the front of their prison-issue smocks, and of course, they had a 24-hour-a-day commitment to the project.

What happened? Think about what you would have done if you were a prisoner. The first day passed smoothly, but the second day, exactly as I would expect with a group of college students, the prisoners revolted, barricading themselves in a room and refusing to follow orders. After a period of confusion, extra guards from other shifts were called in, and the rebellion was squashed.

The prisoners never again acted in unity, and after the rebellion, the guards became increasingly ingenious in their use of social control techniques. Prisoners were made to obey petty, meaningless, and often inconsistent rules, to sound off their numbers and do pushups. Some of the guards were more humane than others, but even the "best" of the guards were committed to maintaining complete control over the prisoners and did not intervene with their more "enthusiastic" fellow guards.

One of the key issues in evaluating experiments is whether they manage to produce situations that are emotionally engaging and "real." Weren't these guards and prisoners just playing a role? They were playing roles, of course, but the roles became frighteningly real. One of the best ways to get a sense of just how real the roles became is through the diary of one of the "guards," a young man who defined himself as a "pacifist."

After the orientation meeting: "Buying uniforms confirms the game-like atmosphere. I doubt whether many of us share the expectations of seriousness that the experimenters seem to have.

Day one: He describes his first strategy, which is never to smile, and he reports feeling stupid in his role as a guard.

Day three: Visitor's day. He describes the unexpected pleasure he feels in ordering prisoners around in front of their friends and family.

Day five: Prisoner 416 refuses to eat his sausage. "We throw him in the hole, ordering him to hold sausages in each hand. We have a crisis of authority... we can't let him get away with this. I tell him all the others will be deprived of visitors if he doesn't eat and he still won't do it. I am very angry at this prisoner for causing discomfort and trouble for others. I decide to force feed him, but he still wouldn't eat it. I let the food slide down his face. I didn't believe it was me doing it. I hated myself for making him eat, but I hated him more for not eating.

Day six: "The experiment is over. I feel elated but am shocked to find some of the other guards disappointed."

Did the roles become real? Already in the first days a prisoner was released because of uncontrollable crying, and by day six, when the experiment was canceled, Zimbardo says that even the researchers were losing track of reality. "In the end," says Zimbardo, "I called off the experiment not because of the horror I saw out there in the prison yard, but because of the horror of realizing that I could have traded places with the most brutal guard or become the weakest prisoner..."

Notice the pacifist guard saying he couldn't believe he was acting this way. One of the hallmarks of the power of social forces, in their more dramatic manifestations, is this sense of behaving in ways that are surprising. "I didn't know I had it in me" can refer to behavior that is either far better or far worse than we'd have expected of ourselves.

A Professor Becomes a Police Officer

George Kirkham was a criminology professor at one of the universities in the Florida state system. His classes often included police officers and former police officers. "Time and again they responded to my somewhat critical lectures about the police with the argument that I could not possibly understand what a police officer has to endure if I hadn't been one." Of course they wouldn't have used this terminology, but what these officers in effect were suggesting was a research methodology known by sociologists as participant observation, in which the researcher becomes a member of the organization or community which s/he wants to understand.

With the help of one of his students, a young police officer on leave from the Jacksonville, Florida police force, Kirkham set out to become a police officer. Jacksonville was a city of more than half a million people, rapidly growing, experiencing all the social problems typical of large cities--crime and delinquency, poverty, racial conflict--with a police force of 800. Police adminstrators there were firmly supportive of Kirkham's becoming a police officer, provided that he met all the regular requirements, including police academy, and provided that the other police officer knew of his dual role as officer and researcher at once.

Kirkham attended the police academy in Tallahassee and joined the force, assigned to patrol duty in the inner city. His own feeling was that he brought unique skills to the job, based on past experience as a mental health worker, correctional counselor, and criminology researcher. It didn't take long for his real world experience to disabuse him of some of his illusions.

Several hours into his very first shift, he and his partner were dispatched to a bar in the downtown area to handle a disturbance complaint. There they encounter a large and boisterous drunk who is arguing with the bartender. "Excuse me, sir," said Kirkham, "but I wonder if I could ask you to step outside and talk with me for just a minute." This was the same kind of gentle, rapport-building approach which Kirkham had used successfully with countless offenders in prison and probation settings. In this instance, the drunk turns around and punches Kirkham in the face. With help from his partner, Kirkham manages to wrestle the man down and get cuffs on him.

Kirkham describes another incident, in which he and his partner are on routine patrol one Saturday evening in a deteriorated area of cheap bars and pool halls. They observe a young male double-parked in the middle of the street, and pull alongside. Again, Kirkham tries sweet reason, and gets a response he didn't expect. The man curses him and begins to shout about harassment. An angry crowd soon gathers around the car and the officers.

"As a criminology professor months earlier, I would have urged that the police officer who was now myself simply leave the car double-parked, rather than risk an incident. As a policeman, however, I had come to realize that an officer can never back down from his responsibility to enforce the law." Was Kirkham wrong when he was a professor and right now as a cop? Was it truly necessary that they pursue this incident to its conclusion? That isn't my point here. Rather, it's that his world view shifted in a major way as a result of assuming a new role.

At this point, things really get out of hand. He and his partner are shoved, and a woman tries to get his service revolver out of its holster. Kirkham struggles into the squad car, puts out an emergency call on the police radio, and triggers the release on the shotgun which Jacksonville police carry in their squad cars. Rounding down on the crowd with the shotgun, a memory flashes through his mind. As a criminology professor, he had always argued that police officers should not be allowed to carry shotguns in their cars, because of their "offensive" character and the damage it does to public relations. Now he was menacing an unarmed crowd with an "offensive" weapon and very glad to have it.

Kirkham describes one final incident. He and his partner are at the end of a night shift, coming off a high speed chase, heading for a restaurant and breakfast, when they hear the sound of breaking glass. They spot two teenage boys running from the scene and chase them and confront them. Kirkham asks the boys to identify themselves, showing his own police I.D. One of the boys cursed him and turned to walk away. "The next thing I knew I had grabbed the youth by his shirt and spun him around, shouting: 'I'm talking to you, punk.'" His partner calms him down. His mind flashes back to a lecture during which he had told his students: Anyone who is not able to maintain absolute control of his or her emotions at all times has no business being a police officer. He was at the time of this incident director of a human relations project designed to teach emotional control skills to police officers.

What's the lesson he draws from this--that he isn't fit to be a police officer? This is not his interpretation. Rather he concludes that from the classroom, he had an unrealistic view of the power of the situation in which the police operate. His was indeed an ivy tower perspective, as his students with police experience had charged. Kirkham ended up feeling that the Jacksonville police were doing a good job under difficult circumstances, and he went back to professoring with mixed feelings about leaving the police force.

Once again, a new role has produced a new way of seeing the world. Compared with the Zimbardo experiment, the social reality entered by Kirkham as he becomes a police officer is more structured; most of his co-participants are veterans, and they help to indoctrinate him in the new reality. In fact, this is a likely time to try to identify the major figures in Kirkham's role set as a police officer. Certainly the opinions of his spouse and his academic colleagues are still important to him; but several key elements have been added. First, his instructors at police academy; next his superiors in the police force; third his peers on the police force, and especially his partner; and finally, those parts of the general citizenry, including its "criminal element," with which he comes into contact on a daily basis. It's probably those last two, especially his peers and the citizenry, who constitute the social forces that most shape his behavior as an officer.

Those of us still in the academic world might say he's been brainwashed and that he now accepts the rationalizations that police might apply to incidents like the Rodney King beating. But if we want to label his experiences as brainwashing, we have to recognize that new roles always involve this kind of reality shift. "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing," as Kenneth Burke put it, and you can't simultaneously see the world as a police officer and as an academic person. Of course, part of the purpose of the participant observation research methodology is to extend our social imagination and try to do just that.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

When we attempt to interpret someon's behavior, that process is called attribution. We tend to attribute people's behavior to their personality and character. And we tend to underestimate the impact of social situations and forces, making what sociologists call the fundamental attribution error.

For example, we would like to attribute the horrors of prison life to the uniquely evil people gathered there. We would like to see police brutality as a product of "police personality." But now ask yourself: "Could I have treated Rodney King that way?" As your perspective becomes more sociological, you will be able to acknowledge that you don't really know how you would handle yourself as an LA police officer or prison guard. As a sociologically informed observer, you will realize it is not just other people who are sometimes pushed around by social forces.

References

Kirkham, George. 1974. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. March: 70.

Zimbardo, Philip, Ron Haney, Ernest Banks, and Louis Jaffe. "The Psychology of Imprisonment." In Rubin, R. (ed.), 1974. Doing Unto Others. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.