Social Irresponsibility in Management

Role-playing offers one approach to studying social responsibility. It avoids some of the difficulties
of survey research, while being substantially cheaper than field experimentation. Role-playing, however,
has been subject to much criticism [22, 43]. For that reason, it is useful to provide a brief review of the
evidence on the validity of role-playing.

Face Validity: Janis and Mann [32] used role-playing to modify smoking habits; subjects who role-
played a lung cancer patient were observed by the experimenter to become emotionally involved with
the role. In a follow-up study, Mann [40] provided reports from the role-players that indicated a
significant amount of emotional involvement. Zimbardo [72] created realistic role play of a prison. The
subjects displayed much emotion and were even surprised at their behavior in their roles. Orne et al.
[54] reviewed research showing that subjects can role-play as hypnotics in such a convincing manner
that observers cannot distinguish between role-players and hypnotics. These studies suggest that role-
playing provides responses that are representative of those by people in an actual situation.

Construct Validity: Numerous studies have compared role-playing to experiments. Greenberg [25]
found similar results for role-playing as for a laboratory experiment on the relationship between anxiety
and the need for affiliation. Willis and Willis [69] used role-playing to successfully replicate the main
effects from a laboratory study on conformity, although the interaction effects were not the same.
Horowitz and Rothschild [30] found that “forewarned role-playing” provided similar results to a
laboratory experiment on conformity. The forewarned role-playing instructions were to “act as you think
subjects would act in this particular situation.” Wexley et al. [68] used role-playing of the appraisal
interview and obtained results similar to those from a field study, Terry [65] used role-playing and
successfully replicated his experiment on expectancy in food tasting. Darroch and Steiner [15] used
role-playing to replicate an experiment on attitude change and found some similarities and some
differences. In the only completely negative study, Yinon et al. [71] found substantial differences
between role-playing and decisions made by students on a grading issue.

A number of the role-playing studies have been done in connection with the obedience experiments.
Holmes and Bennett [29] and Houston and Holmes [31] asked subjects to act as if they would be
receiving an electric shock; subjects gave similar responses on a questionnaire as did subjects who
expected to receive the shocks, but they did not show the same types of physiological changes.
Berscheid et al. [5] used role-playing to replicate the obedience experiment by Ring et al. [57], and
obtained similar results on the effect of debriefing upon subjects. Mixon [47) used role-playing and
replicated the Milgram experiment. Finally, Simons and Piliavin [63] failed to obtain the same results in
studying subject’s reactions to someone who had been punished by electric shocks.

While these results from role-playing are not identical to those from experiments, there were
substantial differences in only 2 of the 13 studies involving construct validity. It is not clear which
approach is closer to truth, but it is clear that they generally produce similar results.

Predictive Validity: Crow and Noel [14] had subjects play the role of the Mexican leader in a
disguised version of the events leading to the annexation of Texas by the U.S. Subjects were asked to

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