Theodore Roy Sarbin (1911–2005) was an American psychologist and professor of psychology and criminology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Roles are socially constructed and can be used to explain a range of human behaviours including acting, shamanic possession, criminality, psychopathology, and hypnosis.
Sarbin emphasised the difference between role-playing and role-taking, the latter being characterised by a greater degree of subjective involvement or identification with the role and belief in it.
Sarbin's doctoral research used data gathered at the University of Minnesota to examine the relative accuracy of statistical versus clinical prediction for the academic achievement of undergraduates.
As a young man Sarbin temporarily rode the rails as a hobo, and he felt this experience helped him to understand people excluded from the mainstream of society.
In 1938, Friedlander and Sarbin introduced a composite scale based on a variety of responses to suggestion, and employing a standardised, scripted routine.
Hypnotic behavior is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotised person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the client.
He adopted a method based upon the primacy of stories as a way of understanding human behavior in preference to the constraints of traditional psychological research paradigms.