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Role-playing

Role-playing or roleplaying is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the Oxford English Dictionary offers a definition of role-playing as "the changing of one's behaviour to fulfill a social role",[1] in the field of psychology, the term is used more loosely in four senses:

"Roleplay" and "Roleplayer" redirect here. For other uses, see Roleplay (disambiguation). For the RPG magazine, see Roleplayer (magazine).

Amusement[edit]

Many children participate in a form of role-playing known as make believe, wherein they adopt certain roles such as doctor and act out those roles in character. Sometimes make believe adopts an oppositional nature, resulting in games such as cops and robbers.

Psychology[edit]

In psychology, an individual's personality can be conceptualized as a set of expectations about oneself and others and that these add up to role-playing or role-taking.[3] Here, the role is fiction because it is not real but it has a degree of consistency.[3] Role-playing is also an important part of a child's psychological development. For example, the instance when a child starts to define "I" and separate him or herself from an adult is the initial condition for and the result of role play.[4] There are also experiments that found role-playing resulted in behavioral change such as the case of smokers who reported negative attitude towards smoking after being asked to pretend to be a person diagnosed with lung cancer.[5]

Research method[edit]

Role playing may also refer to the technique commonly used by researchers studying interpersonal behavior by assigning research participants to particular roles and instructing the participants to act as if a specific set of conditions were true.[7] This technique of assigning and taking roles in psychological research has a long history. It has been used in the early classic social psychological experiments by Kurt Lewin (1939/1997), Stanley Milgram (1963), and Phillip Zimbardo (1971). Herbert Kelman suggested that role-playing might be "the most promising source" of research methods alternative to methods using deception (Kelman 1965).[8]

Acting

Costume

Role reversal

Sexual roleplay