Rôle playing

Originally developed for dramatic purposes, rôle playing has been adapted for educational and therapeutic purposes (e.g., psychodrama and sociodrama), for diagnostic purposes (i.e., to generate hypotheses about a subject’s personality from the observation of his behavior in a rôle playing situation), and for experimental purposes (7).

Janis and King (3) summarize the scant literature in this area and report an investigation in which rôle playing was carried out under laboratory conditions. They find support for “the hypothesis that overt verbalization induced by rôle playing tends to augment the effectiveness of a persuasive communication” (p. 218).

For example: the plant manager, the personnel director, and the superintendent may employ rôle playing in preparing for a union negotiation. While the other two remain in their actual positions, each in sequence may impersonate what he thinks the significant individuals across the bargaining table may say or do, […]

Rôle playing helps us do what we should always try to do anyway—attempt to put ourselves in the other person’s place and see things from his point of view.