Role-taking is the ability to put oneself imaginatively in the position of another person, adopt that person's standpoint towards a situation, and thereby anticipate how she will respond to one's own conduct. For George Herbert Mead this single capacity is the hinge of social life. Because I can respond to my own gesture as you would respond to it, I can control it before it leaves me; because I can see myself as you see me, I acquire a self; and because many of us do this together, our acts mesh into cooperative activity. Mind, self and society are thus not three things to be connected but three aspects of one process, and role-taking is its mechanism.
The medium of role-taking is the significant symbol. A gesture becomes a significant symbol when it arouses in the person making it the same response it arouses in the person receiving it — when the word water calls up thirst-quenching for speaker and hearer alike. Non-significant gestures produce a conversation of gestures, as when two dogs circle each other; only significant symbols, chiefly language, allow a person to take the other's attitude deliberately. Role-taking is therefore not telepathy or emotional contagion but a symbolic accomplishment, learned and fallible.
The developmental sequence: imitation, play, game
Mead traces three stages. In the preparatory or imitative stage the infant copies gestures without grasping their meaning — sweeping with a broom because mother sweeps. In the play stage the child takes one role at a time, and takes it seriously: she is the doctor, then the patient, then the mother scolding the doll, moving between standpoints in succession. What she cannot yet do is hold several perspectives together. In the game stage she must. To play cricket a child must know, at every ball, what the bowler, the wicket-keeper, the fielders and the batsman each expect of her; the roles form an organised system, and she internalises the game as a whole rather than any one player. Mead's contrast between play and the game is the decisive step from a series of borrowed selves to a unified self.
From significant others to the generalised other
Early role-taking is directed at significant others — particular people whose attitudes matter: mother, elder brother, teacher. As their expectations are organised and abstracted, the child comes to take the attitude of the generalised other: the community, the team, the caste, the profession, considered as an organised standpoint rather than a set of individuals. This is what makes conduct predictable across situations and strangers, and it is the source of the Me phase of the self in Mead's account of the I and the Me. Adults continue to acquire new generalised others, which is why occupational socialisation, migration or conversion can reorganise a person's self well after childhood.
Role-taking, role-playing and role enactment
The terms are routinely confused, and examiners notice. Role-taking is cognitive and imaginative — adopting another's standpoint, whether or not one ever occupies that position. Role-playing is performative — acting out a role, as in a training exercise or a stage part — and William Coutu's classic clarification insisted that one may role-play without role-taking, mechanically going through motions without grasping the other's perspective. Role enactment is the actual discharge of the obligations of a status one holds, the concern of role theory in the tradition of Ralph Linton and Robert Merton. Ralph Turner added that role-taking is a matter of degree and of standpoint: we take the role of a reference group as much as of a present individual, and we do it more accurately with those whose world we share.
Socialisation, empathy and cooperation
Role-taking underwrites three things sociology cares about. It makes socialisation an active process rather than an imprinting: the child constructs a self by taking perspectives, and can therefore resist as well as absorb. It grounds empathy and moral judgement — Jean Piaget's account of how rule-bound play teaches reciprocity converges with Mead's game stage. And it makes cooperation possible in the absence of instinct, since coordinated action requires each participant to anticipate the others' contributions. Trade, queues, traffic, committee work and courtship all rest on mutual anticipation rather than on rules alone.
Whose perspective may a child take? Caste and gender in India
Role-taking is not evenly distributed, because societies regulate whom one may imaginatively enter. Where residence, commensality, play groups and schooling are segregated by caste, an upper-caste child may grow up with no occasion to take the standpoint of a Dalit child, and the generalised other she internalises is the community of her own jati presented as the community as such. Leela Dube's work on gender socialisation shows the parallel process for girls: through the everyday idiom of the daughter as paraya dhan, of restraint in eating, speech and movement, and of ritual observances performed for husbands and brothers, a Hindu girl learns early to take the perspective of the household she will marry into and to see herself from it. The consequence is that role-taking, the very capacity that makes sociality possible, can be organised so as to reproduce inequality — an interactionist route to the same conclusion that structural theories reach about gender socialisation.
For the UPSC answer
Define role-taking as the imaginative adoption of another's standpoint through significant symbols, and immediately distinguish it from role-playing and role enactment — this distinction alone lifts an answer. Present the sequence imitation, play, game as the movement from one role at a time to many roles at once, and use the cricket example to show why the game produces a unified self. Then carry the concept into Indian material: segregated childhoods restrict whose perspective can be taken, and Leela Dube's account of girls' socialisation shows role-taking working as a mechanism of subordination. Close by noting the criticism that Mead treats the capacity as benign and says little about power.
References & further reading
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. University of Chicago Press.
- Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Prentice-Hall.
- Turner, R. H. (1956). Role-taking, role standpoint and reference-group behaviour. American Journal of Sociology, 61(4).
- Coutu, W. (1951). Role-playing vs. role-taking: an appeal for clarification. American Sociological Review, 16(2).
- Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. Kegan Paul.
- Dube, L. (2001). Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields. Sage.