In plain language
Why do people have so much trouble getting along at work? Between a quarter and half of Australians report experiencing workplace bullying, and aversive behavior — bullying, gossip, manipulation, lying — costs organizations in legal fees, lost time, morale, and turnover. This book chapter argues that a hidden driver of interpersonal problems is our struggle to control our own emotions: attempts to get rid of unwanted feelings can paradoxically intensify them and pull our behavior away from our values.
The authors describe a social-emotional training program based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that was delivered to members of the New South Wales Police, mainly sergeants and above. Rather than teaching lists of social rules, the program uses experiential role-plays: participants pick a real workplace situation they struggle with (bullying, communicating with a supervisor, giving negative feedback), identify the difficult thoughts and feelings that show up, clarify the value they want to act on, and then role-play the situation several ways while receiving simple “gut-level” ratings from others. The core question posed each time is: are you willing to have the difficult feelings that arise in order to do what you value?
The approach targets three levels — a person’s own psychological stance, how they enact ACT skills like acceptance and mindfulness during an interaction, and how leaders can foster those skills in the people they manage. The chapter argues this experience-driven method addresses known weaknesses of traditional rule-based social skills training, such as poor generalization to new situations, and offers metaphors (like the Tar Baby story) plus reproducible worksheets for practitioners.
Key findings
- Emotion control strategies are framed as a core source of interpersonal difficulty: trying to eliminate negative thoughts and feelings can paradoxically increase them and drive avoidance behavior that conflicts with one’s values.
- The chapter adapts Pierson and Hayes’ three-level ACT therapeutic relationship model to workplace training: (1) the participant’s own psychological stance, (2) enacting ACT processes during social interactions, and (3) fostering acceptance, mindfulness, and valued action in others — especially relevant for managers.
- The experiential role-play method proceeds in four steps: eliciting a real difficult situation, role-playing it, identifying willingness, defusion, and values (the “fundamental question”), and experimenting with new approaches under simple experiential feedback (1–9 gut-level ratings).
- The rationale draws on evidence (e.g., Rosenfarb et al., 1989) that experiential feedback outperforms direct verbal instruction for building social skills, because rule-heavy teaching obscures the natural contingencies of real interactions.
- Traditional social skills training is critiqued for poor generalization across situations and time, weak long-term evidence, and the impossibility of specifying unique rules for every social situation.
- Practical tools are included: the “My Struggle” and “Fundamental Question” worksheets, and ACT metaphors such as the Tar Baby story, which illustrates how attempts to control a difficult person entangle you further.
How to cite
APA
Ciarrochi, J. V., & Bilich-Erich, L. (2009). Promoting social intelligence using the experiential role-play method. In J. T. Blackledge, J. V. Ciarrochi, & F. P. Deane (Eds.), Acceptance and commitment therapy: Contemporary theory research and practice (pp. 247–262). Australian Academic Press.
BibTeX
@incollection{ciarrochi2009promoting,
title = {Promoting social intelligence using the experiential role-play method},
author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph V. and Bilich-Erich, Linda},
booktitle = {Acceptance and commitment therapy: Contemporary theory research and practice},
editor = {Blackledge, John T. and Ciarrochi, Joseph V. and Deane, Frank P.},
publisher = {Australian Academic Press},
address = {Bowen Hills, QLD, Australia},
year = {2009},
pages = {247--262}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version.