What Acting Students Think Other Students Think About Actors

What Acting Students Think Other Students Think About Actors Charles Neuringer The received folklore about the general population's attitudes toward actors can be best exemplified by Cheryl Crawford's statement that she has "heard 'regular' citizens complain that actors are like children, self-centered, emotional , impulsive, unpredictable, with quick angers and easy tears" (243-44). Although Crawford denies such allegations, other theatre folk seem to feel that there is some truth in these characterizations of actors. In a beginning directing textbook, nascent directors were told that actors are "less emotionally stable than the average person" (Dietrich and Duckwall 28). Sanford Meisner, the famed acting teacher, stated that he didn't like actors very much and that he didn't like the things acting brought up in him and other actors such as "the selfcentercdness , the childish vanity, the infantilism. That's what an actor has to have." (174) It is somewhat disturbing to find that these negative opinions are passed on from mentors to students through writings aimed at training young actors, in spite of the fact that there are no data to support this "received wisdom." Besides gathering some much-needed data concerning attitudes towards actors, the current study attempts to assess acting students' opinions about what other people think of actors. Acting students have, on the whole, not as yet been exposed to the vicissitudes of professional life. Their ideas about what others think of actors are probably a product of their immediate interactions with theatre peers, mentors, and their instructional literature, as well as an extended acquaintance with other students, family members, and the media. These young actors are in their personal and professional formative years, and the influences working on them at this time stand a good chance of shaping and determining their attitudes about self, others, and the profession. The lack of hard data concerning the general population's attitudes toward actors poses a serious problem because it limits one's understanding of the reality of actors' feelings about how the non-theatrical population reacts to them. An incidental advantage to the study to be described below is the 157 158 Charles Neuringer gathering of some much-needed basic data concerning people's attitudes towards actors. Although there exists an opinion both within and without the theatre that the general population's attitudes towards actors is somewhat negative, a survey of the available literature, using the LC MARK DATABASE system, failed to reveal the existence of any systematic data on this issue. The closest study one can find is Roe's (1956) survey that the creative professions as a whole have a very low social prestige rating. In this study, acting students were asked to make predictions about the attitudes towards actors that are held by one group with which they have an extended acquaintance: non-theatre students. The general population of students was chosen to represent the wider community because the acting students have interacted with them enough to have developed some knowledge of that group's attitudes on a multitude of subjects. Method In order to measure both the general population of students' attitudes about actors and the ability of student actors to predict the general population of students' attitudes about actors, an adjective checklist instrument was developed for this study. A set of items was assembled from the self-description adjective checklist that Taft utilized in his 1961 study of actors' personalities. Each adjective was rated as either "negative" or "positive." The order of presentation (and the valence) of the 23 adjectives used in this study is found in Table 1. The adjective list was administered to students in a large introductory class in psychology who had volunteered to participate in the study. They were asked to make a forced "yes" or "no" response to each of the adjectives for six different professions, among which was that of "Actor." The other five professions were filler stimuli chosen to disguise the intent of the study. Information about the sex and major area of study of the respondents was also elicited. The instructions to the general population of students were as follows: "I am interested in how people feel and think about certain...