role

Set of behaviours, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms expected from an individual that has a certain social status

EntityQ214339

Also known as social role · human role

Subclass of: role

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

A role is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given individual social status or social position. It is vital to both functionalist and interactionist understandings of society. Social role theory posits the following about social behavior:The division of labour in society takes the form of the interaction among heterogeneous specialized positions, we call roles. Social roles included appropriate and permitted forms of behavior and actions that recur in a group, guided by social norms, which are commonly known and hence determine the expectations for appropriate behavior in these roles, which further explains the position of a person in the society. Roles are occupied by individuals, who are called actors. When individuals approve of a social role, they will incur costs to conform to role norms, and will also incur costs to punish those who violate role norms. Changed conditions can render a social role outdated or illegitimate, in which case social pressures are likely to lead to role change. The anticipation of rewards and punishments, as well as the satisfaction of behaving pro-socially, account for why agents conform to role requirements.

Overview

All data

44 statements · 23% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Members / parts: behavior
obligation
Partially coincident with: social position
Different from: Rol criterion used: descriptive page and disambiguation page have to be in different items · applies to name of subject: rol
Role criterion used: descriptive page and disambiguation page have to be in different items · applies to name of subject: role
occupation

On other databases

37 identifiers linking role across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

23%

externally sourced

Source last edited September 22, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). role (Q214339). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/role-Q214339