Permalink
In the 1970s, an infamous researcher Philip Zimbardo conducted a study that would not pass the ethical standards of the IRB today. In short, he took a handful of healthy, average, intelligent young college students and randomly selected them into groups of prisoners or guards to play their appropriate role for two weeks. The team really went out of their way to recreate the prison setting as best to their ability (shades to dehumanize the guards, frocks with no underthings to emasculate the prisoners, etc.) Instead of continuing for the planned 2 weeks, the study had to be cut short and stopped at day 5. The participants, as far as the researchers were concerned, were average college boys, had begun to have mental breakdowns (prisoners), and became abusive tyrants (guards). You can find more info on this site if you’re curious: http://www.prisonexp.org/ because it’s difficult to grasp the gravity of this study and its findings until you read more in depth.
Even Zimbardo and his team began acting like wardens instead of objective researchers. With hindsight bias, it’s really tempting to vilify Zimbardo and his team. But this has nothing to do with a couple of mad scientists and some bad luck at picking some mentally unstable participants, because that’s not the case at all. The odds that *all* of these men were mentally unstable is improbable and unrealistic. It’d be too easy to demonize these people and dismiss the findings.
The biggest thing that Zimbardo drew from this study was that our penal system is seriously fucked. And it is. It is not built to rehabilitate people, but a human garbage disposal. But I don’t believe the entire picture is taken into account when people see these results. Yes, our prison system is dysfunctional. Yes, soldiers can do horrific things in obedience to orders.
But what about other roles? I have yet to hear people apply these findings to social roles. What this study told me is that humans can be so good at playing their roles, whether tyrants or rebellious prisoners, to a degree of being consummate, then I’m willing to bet that we do this all of teh time. I don’t mean to say that human nature is inherently disingenuous, or that these participants were “faking it”. But this quote sums it up perfectly to me: If you treat someone like an animal long enough, they will act like one.
We get stuck on our prescriptive idea of how people should and can and do behave, instead of how we reinforce people to behave socially. That is such an important distinction. Many of us, as a Western society, are tempted to gape in horror at what we view as archaic, traditional cultures who seem to act like sheep, or so we think. Yet we do have our own cultural roles from which we expect certain things from certain people to act in certain ways in certain settings. And when we have the perfect settings for said actors to play as convincingly as possible, I hypothesize that people act as best as they can to gender roles as well as Zimbardo’s guards did doing their ‘job’.
The prescriptive roles and the way we reinforce them i.e. “Men should act and look like this” probably manipulate not only our ideas but behaviors with regards to gender. Sometimes our ideas shape the tone of the perceived behavior. For instance, I read two different articles on dating and sex. One was written for men, and one for women. The one written for women suggested that you make him feel comfortable and “nurtured”, whereas the one for men said to make her feel “protected”. Essentially, the article described that the partner’s comfort was pivotal, but in different terms that suggested somehow men and women were doing different things, when they weren’t. Tiny things like these bespeak of the cultural expectations we hold for men and women.
Let it be known that I’m not saying that anyone who happens, by coincidence, to fit a stereotype or role is a bad person. But I’m just musing over the way our culture and situation affects us as individuals. When we promote being unique and being yourself in America (even though that message is pretty much hyperbolic), we’re still promoting a cultural value. Whether we think so or not in a traditional sense or otherwise, we seem to be natural born actors to fit whatever part we need to suit our surroundings.
Sometimes I wonder if, as IDing as a genderqueer male, that my desire for top surgery, T and masculine clothing is due to a deeply rooted in these cultural expectations and I don’t even realize it. I feel like I want those things on my own. Then again, there are those who do break those norms, and I’m not really one for convention myself, I just like masculine wardrobe. At least in regards to my latter point, a cigar is just a cigar. On the other hand, the Zimbardo study suggests to me that our socialization and cultural messages we receive are powerful dictators of behavior.
