Self-presentation

Impression Management And Interpersonal Behavior

Mark R Leary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367317911
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about the ways which human behavior is affected concerns with people may be doing, their public impressions they typically prefer that No matter what else other people perceive them in certain desired ways and not perceive them in other, undesired ways. Put simply, human beings have a pervasive and ongoing concern with their self-presentations. Sometimes they act in ceflain ways just to make a particular impression on someone else mras when a job applicant responds inthat will satisfactorily impress the interviewer. But more often, people 5 concerns with others' impressions simply constrain their behavioural options. Most of the time inclined to do things that will lead others to see us as incompetent, inwnoral, maladjusted, or otherwise socially undesirable. As a result, our concerns with others' impressions limit what we are willing to do.Self-presentation almotives underlie and pervade near corner of interpersonal life.

CHAPTER

1

Introduction

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The Nature of Self-Presentation

Self-Presentation and Deception

Unflattering Self-Presentations

A Brief History of Self-Presentation Research

Goffman and the Sociological Approach

Jones and Social Psychology

Resistance to Self-Presentation

Interest in Self-Presentation Spreads

Judging the Impact of One’s Impressions

The Person and the Situation

An Overarching Framework

Summary

If you were raised like many Americans, I suspect that your parents tried to teach you not to worry about what other people thought of you. Americans have a maxim that says that we should rarely be concerned about others’ opinions of us. “Just be yourself. March to your own drummer. Don’t worry about what other people will think.”

In spite of widespread lip service to this view, you probably grew up realizing that people are, in fact, often very concerned about how other people perceive and evaluate them. Virtually everyone thinks about other people’s impressions of him or her from time to time, and some people worry a great deal about how others regard them. Furthermore, just about everybody occasionally behaves in ways that he or she hopes will lead others to form particular impressions of him or her. The reason is clear: despite what our parents told us, most of us realize that the impressions we make on other people do make a difference.

When people interact, they are responding to the impressions they have of one another. Sometimes those impressions are accurate; sometimes they are not. Either way, the impressions people form strongly affect how they respond to one another. As a result, few social situations exist in which people can afford to disregard totally how others are perceiving and evaluating them.

The Nature of Self-Presentation

Given the importance of others’ perceptions in social interaction, we should not be surprised that people keep an eye on how others regard them and, from time to time, try to control the impressions people have of them. The process of controlling how one is perceived by other people is called self-presentation or impression management (Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Schneider, 1981; Schlenker, 1980).

Contrary to what our parents tried to teach us, self-presentation is not always a bad thing. Rather than reflecting manipulativeness, vanity, or insecurity, paying an appropriate degree of attention to others’ impressions is healthy and adaptive. Think for a moment about what the world would be like if no one ever cared about what other people thought of him or her. Think about how people might act if they didn’t care what others thought. Think how they would look, what they might say, how they’d probably smell!

If people showed no regard for others’ perceptions of them, they would fare quite poorly in life. Because our concern with others’ impressions helps keep our behavior within socially appropriate limits, people who were unconcerned with others’ impressions would often behave inappropriately, resulting in negative reactions ranging from disparagement to ostracism. They might laugh at funerals, wear swimwear to the office, or never bathe. They certainly wouldn’t try to put their best foot forward when the situation called for it. As a result, they would have serious difficulties in job interviews and on first dates. Even if initially successful, the tactless person who never impression-managed would have trouble keeping jobs, friends, and lovers.

Furthermore, a certain degree of attention to one’s self-disclosures to other people is essential for the formation of close relationships (Derlega, Metts, Petronio, & Margulis, 1993). People who don’t convey an appropriate amount and type of information about themselves to other people have difficulty developing and maintaining friendships and romantic relationships.

That’s not to say that self-presentation is never problematic. Although it’s an essential component of social interaction, concerns with others’ impressions can create difficulties. For example, people are sometimes too concerned about what others think of them, or they are concerned about their impressions in situations that are inappropriate. As we’ll discuss in later chapters, people’s self-presentational concerns can also interfere with their performance on important tasks, cause them to feel anxious, and lead them to do things that are harmful to themselves or to other people. Yet, despite these problems, there is nothing inherently bad or sleazy about self-presentation.

Few aspects of people’s behavior are unaffected by self-presentational motives. Sometimes people act in certain ways primarily and explicitly to foster a certain impression. When a man tells his date about his glory days as a college athlete, a student cleans up his apartment when his parents are coming to visit, or a woman chooses the clothes she will wear on a job interview, their behavior is affected primarily by their desire to make certain impressions.

At other times, self-presentation is a secondary concern. But even when people’s behavior is motivated by other goals, they typically pursue those goals in ways that do not jeopardize their image in others’ eyes. As a student eats with friends in the cafeteria, her primary goal is to eat (and perhaps to enjoy the company of her friends), and self-presentational concerns are secondary. Even so, the student does not take food off others’ plates without asking, wipe her mouth on her blouse, or belch loudly. When I am walking through a music store to buy a new compact disk, my primary goal is to buy the CD. But I pursue my goal in a way that doesn’t create bad impressions. I walk—not run—through the store; I don’t shout at people who get in my way; and I don’t criticize other shoppers’ choices of music, no matter how stupid I might think they are.

Thus, even when we are doing other things and impression management is not our primary goal, our behavior is usually constrained by our concerns with others’ impressions. No matter what else we might be doing, we rarely intentionally do things that will make us appear incompetent, immoral, unattractive, or otherwise socially undesirable. (Of course, some of us may accidentally present such negative images of ourselves more often than we would like.) Self-presentation provides a constraint within which most other behaviors occur.

Self-Presentation and Deception

You don’t need a psychologist to tell you that people sometimes lie about themselves. In extreme cases, people may con others into thinking they are someone or something they are not. More commonly, people may try to get others to form impressions that, although not completely false, are more positive than is warranted—that they are wealthier or more intelligent than they really are, for example.

Although some self-presentations are exaggerations and others are downright lies, most of the time the impressions people try to make on others are not deceptive. We are all multifaceted individuals, and in any given situation, we could convey many different impressions of ourselves, all of which are true. Rather than lying, people typically select the images they want others to form from their repertoire of true self-images. This selection is often tactical in the sense that it is based on their goals in the situation and on their assumptions about which impressions will best achieve those goals. But the impressions they ultimately try to create in others’ minds are more often accurate rather than deceptive (Schlenker, 1980; Schlenker & Weigold, 1992).

If you and I met, what would we disclose about ourselves to one another? Would I tell you that I am a university professor and specifically a social psychologist? Would I mention that I run regularly, or that I once played in rock and jazz bands? Do I tell you that I enjoy football more than baseball, or confess that I know as little about cars as anybody else I know? Would I describe my childhood, my successes and failures, my goals in life?

I could convey any one of these impressions of myself to you, all of them truthful, but (as you would) I would be selective in the images I created. I’d probably be more likely to mention that I’m a psychologist if I knew you were a psychology student because I’ve found that nonpsychologists seem to think I’m going to analyze everything they say. I’m probably more likely to mention running if you look physically fit than if you look like you’ve never exercised a moment in your life. Unless I intentionally wanted to argue with you, I might not mention my musical interests if you enjoyed only classical music and were on a tirade about the decadence of popular music. If we’re just talking about sports, I might mention my preference for football, but if you were a member of the university baseball team, I probably wouldn’t. If you’re a mechanic who’s working on my car, I’m not likely to profess my ignorance about cars; if you get the impression I’m an automotive illiterate, who knows what you might try to pull off on me?

My point is that, although people sometimes present images of themselves that are not true, impression management usually involves accurate impressions colored by tactical changes in emphasis, tone, and omission. Sometimes the selection is completely self-serving (as when I fail to mention that I’m a psychologist because you might think I’m weird), but sometimes it’s also for others’ benefit (as when I don’t brag about running a marathon to someone who’s a couch potato).

Schlenker and Weigold (1992) suggested that believability is a very important consideration when people construct their social identities. If others do not regard the images that people project as reasonably accurate constructions of reality, they will be dismissed as manipulative, deceptive, or deluded. Furthermore, most people find it anxiety producing to project and maintain public images that they know are not true. Because of these considerations, people project truly deceptive self-pre-sentations only in rare instances.

Unflattering Self-Presentations

Think for a moment of a specific instance in which you wanted other people to form a certain impression of you. Chances are the situation you imagined was one in which you wanted to make a positive or favorable impression. In most cases, we want others to perceive us in socially desirable ways. We would usually rather be regarded as competent than incompetent, as moral than immoral, and as attractive than as unattractive, and so on.

However, not all self-presentations are positive. In some cases, the impressions people try to convey are far from socially desirable. For example, people sometimes want to be seen as threatening or intimidating because such impressions will help them achieve their interpersonal goals. Perhaps you’ve had a boss who made sure his employees perceived him as gruff and intolerant to keep them in line. Similarly, a member of a street gang may dress and act in threatening ways so that people will be scared of him. Closer to home, most of us have tried to get rid of a bore by conveying an impression of hostility or disinterest (Schneider, 1981). In other cases, people may want to be seen as incompetent or weak because such impressions will lead others to help or support them. People will even try to be seen as unlikable if doing so helps them achieve their goals (Jellison & Gentry, 1978).

The primary goal of self-presentation is not to be perceived positively per se, but to influence other people to respond in desired ways (Jones & Pittman, 1982). In most cases, people are more likely to treat us as we want them to when they have positive impressions of us—that we are friendly, competent, ethical, and attractive, for example. Because of this, the impressions people usually try to make are positive, socially desirable ones.

In other cases, however, people are more likely to be treated as they desire if they foster undesirable impressions in others’ eyes. As we’ll explore in detail later in the book, people sometimes think their interests will be best served if they can get others to perceive them as violent, incompetent, ill, or even mentally disturbed (Braginsky, Braginsky, & Ring, 1969; Jones & Pittman, 1982; Kowalski & Leary, 1990).

A Brief History of Self-Presentation Research

As a student, I cringed whenever the author of a book launched into a discussion of the history of his or her topic. But I see now that understanding something about the development of an area helps us understand the area itself—its emphases, biases, controversies, blind spots, and so on. So, please bear with me. I’ll make this history as brief and as painless as possible.

Interest in self-presentation emerged somewhat independently at about the same time in psychology and sociology. Although it may seem that sociologists and psychologists (especially social psychologists) would have many things in common, connections between the disciplines have traditionally been weak, and sociologists and psychologists have typically relied little on each other’s work. However, researchers interested in self-presentation would find it nearly impossible to carry out their work without relying on concepts, theories, and research from both sociology and psychology.

Goffman and the Sociological Approach

The systematic study of self-presentation began with the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. Although he wrote many essays relevant to the study of human interaction, Goffman’s major contribution was The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959. Goffman’s basic premise was that many of the most revealing insights about social behavior are to be found not in analyzing people’s inner motives or personalities, but in studying the surface appearances people create for one another. Whereas psychologists often look beyond people’s overt behavior to understand their “true” underlying motives and characteristics, Goffman insisted that much can be gained by focusing on public behavior.

In the course of social life, people’s responses to one another are heavily based on these surface appearances. Contrary to the advice we receive, we do judge books (and people) by their covers. And, because of this, people often present images of themselves that affect others’ judgments and reactions. According to Goff nan, a full understanding of human behavior requires that we pay attention to these public images. His view was consistent with Cooley’s (1902) claim that “the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society” (p. 87).

For Goffman, people control how other people treat them by influencing others’ definition of the situation. They influence others’ definition of the situation by giving others the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with their objectives. “Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey” (Goffman, 1959, p. 4).

According to Goffman, self-presentation is not only functional for the individual, but it is essential for smooth interaction. Effective social interaction requires that the interactants know a little about one another—about one another’s socioeconomic status, attitudes, trustworthiness, competence, and so on. Yet, interactants often find it difficult to learn much about other people. Here’s where self-presentation helps. The public images people convey give other interactants some idea of how they expect to be treated and how they should expect to treat others.

Goffman seeme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Tactics
• 3 The Self-Presentational Motive
• 4 The Social Context: Norms and Roles
• 5 The Target’s Values
• 6 Current Social Image
• 7 Instrumental Complementarity
• 8 The Private Self
• 9 Worrying About Impressions
• References
• Index