Page 186 - The Social Animal

168 The Social Animal

Dr. Mensch. When they describe him on both teacher evaluations
and informally, they use words and phrases such as warm, caring, con-
cerned about students, approachable, charismatic, brilliant, and friendly.
However, Dr. Mensch’s professional colleagues have a different
image of him, especially those who have given professional talks
when he was in the audience. Like the students, they see him as bril-
liant, but they also describe Dr. Mensch as intense, critical, tough, ar-
gumentative, and relentless.
Who has the right impression—the students or the professional
colleagues? Is he really a tough, critical person who is simply putting
on an act in order to appear to be warm and caring in front of his
students? Or is he really a warm and caring individual who pretends
to be tough when confronting other psychologists? These are the
wrong questions.The fact is that my friend is capable of a wide range
of behaviors. He is all these things—and more that we will never see.
Some social roles tend to pull behavior from one part of the spec-
trum; other social roles tend to pull behavior from a different part of
the spectrum. The students see Dr. Mensch in only one role—that
of teacher. He is a very good teacher, and the job of a good teacher
is to get the best out of the student; this usually requires warm and
caring behavior. The students have accurately described my friend’s
behavior within this role.
On the other hand, the role of a useful professional colleague
sometimes requires adversarial behavior. To discover the truth, a
good professional often will strongly press an argument to see how
far it will go. This frequently results in sharp, intense, and relentless
criticism. Thus, Dr. Mensch’s professional colleagues also accurately
describe the behavior that they see. However, both students and pro-
fessional colleagues make a fundamental attribution error when they
assume that the behavior they observe is due entirely to some per-
sonality characteristic; rather, it is based largely on the way Dr. Men-
sch perceives the requirements of his social role. This is not to say
that personality is irrelevant. Not everyone is capable of the wide
array of behaviors manifested by Dr. Mensch. But to assume that he
is either tough or warm is to ignore the power of the social role.
A clever experiment by Lee Ross,Teresa Amabile, and Julia Stein-
metz illustrates how the impact of social roles can be underestimated
in explaining behavior. They set up a “quiz show” format in which
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they randomly assigned subjects to one of two roles: (1) a questioner,
whose task it was to prepare difficult questions for (2) a contestant,