ChapteR 10 Behavior in Social and Cultural Context 343comfortable talking with Latino students. They
like to stand close, too.”
Naturally, people bring their own personali-
ties and interests to the roles they play. Just as two
actors will play the same part differently although
they are reading from the same script, they will
have their own reading of how to play the role of
student, friend, parent, or employee. Nonetheless,
the requirements of a social role are strong, so
strong that they may even cause you to behave in
ways that shatter your fundamental sense of the
kind of person you are. We turn now to two classic
studies that illuminate the power of social roles in
our lives.The Obedience Study LO 10.2, LO 10.3
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram (1963,
1974) designed a study that would become world
famous. Milgram wanted to know how many
people would obey an authority figure when di-
rectly ordered to violate their ethical standards.
Participants in the study thought they were part
of an experiment on the effects of punishment
on learning. Each was assigned, apparently at
random, to the role of “teacher.” Another person,
introduced as a fellow volunteer, was the “learner.”
Whenever the learner, seated in an adjoining
room, made an error in reciting a list of word pairs
he was supposed to have memorized, the teacher
had to give him an electric shock by depressing a
lever on a machine (see Figure 10.1). With each
error, the voltage (marked from 0 to 450) was to
be increased by another 15 volts. The shock lev-
els on the machine were labeled from SLIGHT
SHOCK to DANGER—SEVERE SHOCK and,
finally, ominously, XXX. In reality, the learners
were confederates of Milgram and did not receivemost white Americans, Canadians, and northern
Europeans uneasy, unless they are talking inti-
mately with a lover. The English and the Swedes
stand farthest apart when they converse; southern
Europeans stand closer; and Latin Americans and
Arabs stand the closest (Keating, 1994; Sommer,
1969).
If you are talking to someone who has differ-
ent cultural rules for distance from yours, you are
likely to feel very uncomfortable without knowing
why. You may feel that the person is crowding
you or being strangely cool and distant. A stu-
dent from Lebanon told us how relieved he was
to understand how cultures differ in their rules
for conversational distance. “When Anglo stu-
dents moved away from me, I thought they were
prejudiced,” he said. “Now I see why I was more
Arabs stand much closer in conversation than Western-
ers do. Most Westerners would feel “crowded” standing
so close, even when talking to a close friend.
Figure 10.1 The Milgram Obedience experiment
On the left is Milgram’s original shock machine; in 1963, it looked pretty ominous. On the right, the
“learner” is being strapped into his chair by the experimenter and the “teacher.”
[Left] Archives of the History of American Psychology–The University of Akron. [Right] Copyright 1965 by Stanley Milgram.
From the film “Obedience,” distributed by Penn State Media Sales.