certainly appears to be in a better position to adapt to a changing world.
The point is that change in opinions is not only consistent with stabilityof personality: It is itself an enduring quality of some individuals.
Social Roles
Few ideas in the social sciences can match the scope or power of theconcept of role. Social-psychological jargon is full of qualifications of
the basic metaphor: role expectation, role performance, public role, de -
viant role, even roleless role. Role theorists (Goffman, 1959; G. H.
Mead, 1934), who tend to be sociologists rather than psychologists,have spent considerable time and effort in proposing and debating vari -
ous definitions of that eminently useful concept, but for our purposes
most of them are equally good. Allport (1961), for example, defined arole as “a structured mode of participation in social life. More simply , itis what society expects of an individual occupying a given position inthe group” (p. 181).
Roles are so peculiarly useful because they bridge the gap between
the individual and the society . On the one hand, roles are functionalunits of social systems, and without even mentioning individual per-sons a sociologist can describe a society by specifying the nature andinteraction of roles. The traditional nuclear family , for example, consistsof a father and mother (in the complementary roles of husband andwife) and one or more children, who, in addition to being sons anddaughters to their parents, are also sisters and brothers to each other.Everyone in this system has a predefined part to play: Parents are sup -
posed to take care of the children but also to control and guide them;
children are supposed to love and obey their parents. (The fact that thismodel family is so seldom seen in reality is a cause for distress to allconcerned, but a sophisticated role theorist would point out that therole of teenager in modern America is defined as much by defiance as byobedience.) Other social systems are also understandable in terms ofroles: A business consists of bosses, workers, and customers; a city hasofficials and citizens.
On the other hand, roles serve an equally important function for
individuals. As Characteristic Adaptations, they can be consideredscripts that tell people what to do in specific situations. For example, awoman who has internalized the role of supervisor has learned the skills
needed to manage others and understands the obligation to make workInfluences of Personality on the Life Course 211