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The self presentation theory and how to present your best self

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What does self presentation mean?

What are self presentation goals, individual differences and self presentation.

How can you make the most of the self presentation theory at work?  

We all want others to see us as confident, competent, and likeable — even if we don’t necessarily feel that way all the time. In fact, we make dozens of decisions every day — whether consciously or unconsciously — to get people to see us as we want to be seen. But is this kind of self presentation dishonest? Shouldn’t we just be ourselves?

Success requires interacting with other people. We can’t control the other side of those interactions. But we can think about how the other person might see us and make choices about what we want to convey. 

Self presentation is any behavior or action made with the intention to influence or change how other people see you. Anytime we're trying to get people to think of us a certain way, it's an act of self presentation. Generally speaking, we work to present ourselves as favorably as possible. What that means can vary depending on the situation and the other person.

Although at first glance this may seem disingenuous, we all engage in self-presentation. We want to make sure that we show up in a way that not only makes us look good, but makes us feel good about ourselves.

Early research on self presentation focused on narcissism and sociopathy, and how people might use the impression others have of them to manipulate others for their benefit. However, self presentation and manipulation are distinct. After all, managing the way others see us works for their benefit as well as ours.

Imagine, for example, a friend was complaining to you about   a tough time they were having at work . You may want to show up as a compassionate person. However, it also benefits your friend — they feel heard and able to express what is bothering them when you appear to be present, attentive, and considerate of their feelings. In this case, you’d be conscious of projecting a caring image, even if your mind was elsewhere, because you value the relationship and your friend’s experience.

To some extent, every aspect of our lives depends on successful self-presentation. We want our families to feel that we are worthy of attention and love. We present ourselves as studious and responsible to our teachers. We want to seem fun and interesting at a party, and confident at networking events. Even landing a job depends on you convincing the interviewer that you are the best person for the role.

There are three main reasons why people engage in self presentation:

Tangible or social benefits:

In order to achieve the results we want, it often requires that we behave a certain way. In other words, certain behaviors are desirable in certain situations. Matching our behavior to the circumstances can help us connect to others,   develop a sense of belonging , and attune to the needs and feelings of others.

Example:   Michelle is   a new manager . At her first leadership meeting, someone makes a joke that she doesn’t quite get. When everyone else laughs, she smiles, even though she’s not sure why.

By laughing along with the joke, Michelle is trying to fit in and appear “in the know.” Perhaps more importantly, she avoids feeling (or at least appearing) left out, humorless, or revealing that she didn’t get it — which may hurt her confidence and how she interacts with the group in the future.

To facilitate social interaction:

As mentioned, certain circumstances and roles call for certain behaviors. Imagine a defense attorney. Do you think of them a certain way? Do you have expectations for what they do — or don’t — do? If you saw them frantically searching for their car keys, would you feel confident with them defending your case?

If the answer is no, then you have a good idea of why self presentation is critical to social functioning. We’re surprised when people don’t present themselves in a way that we feel is consistent with the demands of their role. Having an understanding of what is expected of you — whether at home, work, or in relationships — may help you succeed by inspiring confidence in others.

Example:   Christopher has always been called a “know-it-all.” He reads frequently and across a variety of topics, but gets nervous and tends to talk over people. When attending a networking event, he is uncharacteristically quiet. Even though he would love to speak up, he’s afraid of being seen as someone who “dominates” the conversation. 

Identity Construction:

It’s not enough for us to declare who we are or what we want to be — we have to take actions consistent with that identity. In many cases, we also have to get others to buy into this image of ourselves as well. Whether it’s a personality trait or a promotion, it can be said that we’re not who   we   think we are, but who others see.

Example:   Jordan is interested in moving to a client-facing role. However, in their last performance review, their manager commented that Jordan seemed “more comfortable working independently.” 

Declaring themselves a “people person” won’t make Jordan’s manager see them any differently. In order to gain their manager’s confidence, Jordan will have to show up as someone who can comfortably engage with clients and thrive in their new role.

We may also use self presentation to reinforce a desired identity for ourselves. If we want to accomplish something, make a change, or   learn a new skill , making it public is a powerful strategy. There's a reason why people who share their goals are more likely to be successful. The positive pressure can help us stay accountable to our commitments in a way that would be hard to accomplish alone.

Example:   Fatima wants to run a 5K. She’s signed up for a couple before, but her perfectionist tendencies lead her to skip race day because she feels she hasn’t trained enough. However, when her friend asks her to run a 5K with her, she shows up without a second thought.

In Fatima’s case, the positive pressure — along with the desire to serve a more important value (friendship) — makes showing up easy.

Because we spend so much time with other people (and our success largely depends on what they think of us), we all curate our appearance in one way or another. However, we don’t all desire to have people see us in the same way or to achieve the same goals. Our experiences and outcomes may vary based on a variety of factors.

One important factor is our level of self-monitoring when we interact with others. Some people are particularly concerned about creating a good impression, while others are uninterested. This can vary not only in individuals, but by circumstances.   A person may feel very confident at work , but nervous about making a good impression on a first date.

Another factor is self-consciousness — that is, how aware people are of themselves in a given circumstance. People that score high on scales of public self-consciousness are aware of how they come across socially. This tends to make it easier for them to align their behavior with the perception that they want others to have of them.

Finally, it's not enough to simply want other people to see you differently. In order to successfully change how other people perceive you, need to have three main skills: 

1. Perception and empathy

Successful self-presentation depends on being able to correctly perceive   how people are feeling , what's important to them, and which traits you need to project in order to achieve your intended outcomes.

2. Motivation

If we don’t have a compelling reason to change the perception that others have of us, we are not likely to try to change our behavior. Your desire for a particular outcome, whether it's social or material, creates a sense of urgency.

3.  A matching skill set

You’ve got to be able to walk the talk. Your actions will convince others more than anything you say. In other words, you have to provide evidence that you are the person you say you are. You may run into challenges if you're trying to portray yourself as skilled in an area where you actually lack experience.

How can you make the most of the self presentation theory at work?

At its heart, self presentation requires a high-level of self awareness and empathy. In order to make sure that we're showing up as our best in every circumstance — and with each person — we have to be aware of our own motivation as well as what would make the biggest difference to the person in front of us.

Here are 6 strategies to learn to make the most of the self-presentation theory in your career:

1. Get feedback from people around you

Ask a trusted friend or mentor to share what you can improve. Asking for feedback about specific experiences, like a recent project or presentation, will make their suggestions more relevant and easier to implement.

2. Study people who have been successful in your role

Look at how they interact with other people. How do you perceive them? Have they had to cultivate particular skills or ways of interacting with others that may not have come easily to them?

3. Be yourself

Look for areas where you naturally excel and stand out. If you feel comfortable, confident, and happy, you’ll have an easier time projecting that to others. It’s much harder to present yourself as confident when you’re uncomfortable.

4. Be aware that you may mess up

As you work to master new skills and ways of interacting with others,   keep asking for feedback . Talk to your manager, team, or a trusted friend about how you came across. If you sense that you’ve missed the mark, address it candidly. People will understand, and you’ll learn more quickly.

Try saying, “I hope that didn’t come across as _______. I want you to know that…”

5. Work with a coach

Coaches are skilled in interpersonal communication and committed to your success. Roleplay conversations to see how they land, and practice what you’ll say and do in upcoming encounters. Over time, a coach will also begin to know you well enough to notice patterns and suggest areas for improvement.

6. The identity is in the details

Don’t forget about the other aspects of your presentation. Take a moment to visualize yourself being the way that you want to be seen. Are there certain details that would make you feel more like that person? Getting organized, refreshing your wardrobe, rewriting your resume, and even cleaning your home office can all serve as powerful affirmations of your next-level self.

Self presentation is defined as the way we try to control how others see us, but it’s just as much about how we see ourselves. It is a skill to achieve a level of comfort with who we are   and   feel confident to choose how we self-present. Consciously working to make sure others get to see the very best of you is a wonderful way to develop into the person you want to be.

Understand Yourself Better:

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Allaya Cooks-Campbell

With over 15 years of content experience, Allaya Cooks Campbell has written for outlets such as ScaryMommy, HRzone, and HuffPost. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and is a certified yoga instructor as well as a certified Integrative Wellness & Life Coach. Allaya is passionate about whole-person wellness, yoga, and mental health.

Impression management: Developing your self-presentation skills

6 presentation skills and how to improve them, how to make a presentation interactive and exciting, how to give a good presentation that captivates any audience, how to not be nervous for a presentation — 13 tips that work (really), what is self-preservation 5 skills for achieving it, developing psychological flexibility, here and now: discover the benefits of being present, how self-knowledge builds success: self-awareness in the workplace, how self-compassion strengthens resilience, how self-efficacy can boost your personal success, what is self-awareness and how to develop it, what i didn't know before working with a coach: the power of reflection, self-advocacy: improve your life by speaking up, building resilience part 6: what is self-efficacy, why learning from failure is your key to success, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..

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• Personality

Self-Presentation in the Digital World

Do traditional personality theories predict digital behaviour.

Posted August 31, 2021 | Reviewed by Chloe Williams

• What Is Personality?
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• Personality theories can help explain real-world differences in self-presentation behaviours but they may not apply to online behaviours.
• In the real world, women have higher levels of behavioural inhibition tendencies than men and are more likely to avoid displeasing others.
• Based on this assumption, one would expect women to present themselves less on social media, but women tend to use social media more than men.

Digital technology allows people to construct and vary their self-identity more easily than they can in the real world. This novel digital- personality construction may, or may not, be helpful to that person in the long run, but it is certainly more possible than it is in the real world. Yet how this relates to "personality," as described by traditional personality theories, is not really known. Who will tend to manipulate their personality online, and would traditional personality theories predict these effects? A look at what we do know about gender differences in the real and digital worlds suggests that many aspects of digital behaviour may not conform to the expectations of personality theories developed for the real world.

Half a century ago, Goffman suggested that individuals establish social identities by employing self-presentation tactics and impression management . Self-presentational tactics are techniques for constructing or manipulating others’ impressions of the individual and ultimately help to develop that person’s identity in the eyes of the world. The ways other people react are altered by choosing how to present oneself – that is, self-presentation strategies are used for impression management . Others then uphold, shape, or alter that self-image , depending on how they react to the tactics employed. This implies that self-presentation is a form of social communication, by which people establish, maintain, and alter their social identity.

These self-presentational strategies can be " assertive " or "defensive." 1 Assertive strategies are associated with active control of the person’s self-image; and defensive strategies are associated with protecting a desired identity that is under threat. In the real world, the use of self-presentational tactics has been widely studied and has been found to relate to many behaviours and personalities 2 . Yet, despite the enormous amounts of time spent on social media , the types of self-presentational tactics employed on these platforms have not received a huge amount of study. In fact, social media appears to provide an ideal opportunity for the use of self-presentational tactics, especially assertive strategies aimed at creating an identity in the eyes of others.

Seeking to Experience Different Types of Reward

Social media allows individuals to present themselves in ways that are entirely reliant on their own behaviours – and not on factors largely beyond their ability to instantly control, such as their appearance, gender, etc. That is, the impression that the viewer of the social media post receives is dependent, almost entirely, on how or what another person posts 3,4 . Thus, the digital medium does not present the difficulties for individuals who wish to divorce the newly-presented self from the established self. New personalities or "images" may be difficult to establish in real-world interactions, as others may have known the person beforehand, and their established patterns of interaction. Alternatively, others may not let people get away with "out of character" behaviours, or they may react to their stereotype of the person in front of them, not to their actual behaviours. All of which makes real-life identity construction harder.

Engaging in such impression management may stem from motivations to experience different types of reward 5 . In terms of one personality theory, individuals displaying behavioural approach tendencies (the Behavioural Activation System; BAS) and behavioural inhibition tendencies (the Behavioural Inhibition System; BIS) will differ in terms of self-presentation behaviours. Those with strong BAS seek opportunities to receive or experience reward (approach motivation ); whereas, those with strong BIS attempt to avoid punishment (avoidance motivation). People who need to receive a lot of external praise may actively seek out social interactions and develop a lot of social goals in their lives. Those who are more concerned about not incurring other people’s displeasure may seek to defend against this possibility and tend to withdraw from people. Although this is a well-established view of personality in the real world, it has not received strong attention in terms of digital behaviours.

Real-World Personality Theories May Not Apply Online

One test bed for the application of this theory in the digital domain is predicted gender differences in social media behaviour in relation to self-presentation. Both self-presentation 1 , and BAS and BIS 6 , have been noted to show gender differences. In the real world, women have shown higher levels of BIS than men (at least, to this point in time), although levels of BAS are less clearly differentiated between genders. This view would suggest that, in order to avoid disapproval, women will present themselves less often on social media; and, where they do have a presence, adopt defensive self-presentational strategies.

The first of these hypotheses is demonstrably false – where there are any differences in usage (and there are not that many), women tend to use social media more often than men. What we don’t really know, with any certainty, is how women use social media for self-presentation, and whether this differs from men’s usage. In contrast to the BAS/BIS view of personality, developed for the real world, several studies have suggested that selfie posting can be an assertive, or even aggressive, behaviour for females – used in forming a new personality 3 . In contrast, sometimes selfie posting by males is related to less aggressive, and more defensive, aspects of personality 7 . It may be that women take the opportunity to present very different images of themselves online from their real-world personalities. All of this suggests that theories developed for personality in the real world may not apply online – certainly not in terms of putative gender-related behaviours.

We know that social media allows a new personality to be presented easily, which is not usually seen in real-world interactions, and it may be that real-world gender differences are not repeated in digital contexts. Alternatively, it may suggest that these personality theories are now simply hopelessly anachronistic – based on assumptions that no longer apply. If that were the case, it would certainly rule out any suggestion that such personalities are genetically determined – as we know that structure hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 20 years.

1. Lee, S.J., Quigley, B.M., Nesler, M.S., Corbett, A.B., & Tedeschi, J.T. (1999). Development of a self-presentation tactics scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 26(4), 701-722.

2. Laghi, F., Pallini, S., & Baiocco, R. (2015). Autopresentazione efficace, tattiche difensive e assertive e caratteristiche di personalità in Adolescenza. Rassegna di Psicologia, 32(3), 65-82.

3. Chua, T.H.H., & Chang, L. (2016). Follow me and like my beautiful selfies: Singapore teenage girls’ engagement in self-presentation and peer comparison on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 190-197.

4. Fox, J., & Rooney, M.C. (2015). The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites. Personality and Individual Differences, 76, 161-165.

5. Hermann, A.D., Teutemacher, A.M., & Lehtman, M.J. (2015). Revisiting the unmitigated approach model of narcissism: Replication and extension. Journal of Research in Personality, 55, 41-45.

6. Carver, C.S., & White, T.L. (1994). Behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation, and affective responses to impending reward and punishment: the BIS/BAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(2), 319.

7. Sorokowski, P., Sorokowska, A., Frackowiak, T., Karwowski, M., Rusicka, I., & Oleszkiewicz, A. (2016). Sex differences in online selfie posting behaviors predict histrionic personality scores among men but not women. Computers in Human Behavior, 59, 368-373.

Phil Reed, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Swansea University.

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A Simple Way to Introduce Yourself

• Andrea Wojnicki

Think: present, past, future.

Many of us dread the self-introduction, be it in an online meeting or at the boardroom table. Here is a practical framework you can leverage to introduce yourself with confidence in any context, online or in-person: Present, past, and future. You can customize this framework both for yourself as an individual and for the specific context. Perhaps most importantly, when you use this framework, you will be able to focus on others’ introductions, instead of stewing about what you should say about yourself.

You know the scenario. It could be in an online meeting, or perhaps you are seated around a boardroom table. The meeting leader asks everyone to briefly introduce themselves. Suddenly, your brain goes into hyperdrive. What should I say about myself?

• Andrea Wojnicki , MBA, DBA, is an executive communication coach and founder of Talk About Talk, a multi-media learning resource to help executives improve their communication skills.

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Impression Management: Erving Goffman Theory

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

• Impression management refers to the goal-directed conscious or unconscious attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object, or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.
• Generally, people undertake impression management to achieve goals that require they have a desired public image. This activity is called self-presentation.
• In sociology and social psychology, self-presentation is the conscious or unconscious process through which people try to control the impressions other people form of them.
• The goal is for one to present themselves the way in which they would like to be thought of by the individual or group they are interacting with. This form of management generally applies to the first impression.
• Erving Goffman popularized the concept of perception management in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , where he argues that impression management not only influences how one is treated by other people but is an essential part of social interaction.

Impression Management in Sociology

Impression management, also known as self-presentation, refers to the ways that people attempt to control how they are perceived by others (Goffman, 1959).

By conveying particular impressions about their abilities, attitudes, motives, status, emotional reactions, and other characteristics, people can influence others to respond to them in desirable ways.

Impression management is a common way for people to influence one another in order to obtain various goals.

While earlier theorists (e.g., Burke, 1950; Hart & Burk, 1972) offered perspectives on the person as a performer, Goffman (1959) was the first to develop a specific theory concerning self-presentation.

In his well-known work, Goffman created the foundation and the defining principles of what is commonly referred to as impression management.

In explicitly laying out a purpose for his work, Goffman (1959) proposes to “consider the ways in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kind of things he may or may not do while sustaining his performance before them.” (p. xi)

Social Interaction

Goffman viewed impression management not only as a means of influencing how one is treated by other people but also as an essential part of social interaction.

He communicates this view through the conceit of theatre. Actors give different performances in front of different audiences, and the actors and the audience cooperate in negotiating and maintaining the definition of a situation.

To Goffman, the self was not a fixed thing that resides within individuals but a social process. For social interactions to go smoothly, every interactant needs to project a public identity that guides others’ behaviors (Goffman, 1959, 1963; Leary, 2001; Tseelon, 1992).

Goffman defines that when people enter the presence of others, they communicate information by verbal intentional methods and by non-verbal unintentional methods.

According to Goffman, individuals participate in social interactions through performing a “line” or “a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself” (1967, p. 5).

Such lines are created and maintained by both the performer and the audience. By enacting a line effectively, a person gains positive social value or “face.”

The verbal intentional methods allow us to establish who we are and what we wish to communicate directly. We must use these methods for the majority of the actual communication of data.

Goffman is mostly interested in the non-verbal clues given off which are less easily manipulated. When these clues are manipulated the receiver generally still has the upper hand in determining how realistic the clues that are given off are.

People use these clues to determine how to treat a person and if the intentional verbal responses given off are actually honest. It is also known that most people give off clues that help to represent them in a positive light, which tends to be compensated for by the receiver.

Impression Management Techniques

• Suppressing emotions : Maintaining self-control (which we will identify with such practices as speaking briefly and modestly).
• Conforming to Situational Norms : The performer follows agreed-upon rules for behavior in the organization.
• Flattering Others : The performer compliments the perceiver. This tactic works best when flattery is not extreme and when it involves a dimension important to the perceiver.
• Being Consistent : The performer’s beliefs and behaviors are consistent. There is agreement between the performer’s verbal and nonverbal behaviors.

Self-Presentation Examples

Self-presentation can affect the emotional experience . For example, people can become socially anxious when they are motivated to make a desired impression on others but doubt that they can do so successfully (Leary, 2001).

In one paper on self-presentation and emotional experience, Schlenker and Leary (1982) argue that, in contrast to the drive models of anxiety, the cognitive state of the individual mediates both arousal and behavior.

The researchers examine the traditional inverted-U anxiety-performance curve (popularly known as the Yerkes-Dodson law) in this light.

The researchers propose that people are interpersonally secure when they do not have the goal of creating a particular impression on others.

They are not immediately concerned about others’ evaluative reactions in a social setting where they are attempting to create a particular impression and believe that they will be successful in doing so.

Meanwhile, people are anxious when they are uncertain about how to go about creating a certain impression (such as when they do not know what sort of attributes the other person is likely to be impressed with), think that they will not be able to project the types of images that will produce preferred reactions from others.

Such people think that they will not be able to project the desired image strongly enough or believe that some event will happen that will repudiate their self-presentations, causing reputational damage (Schlenker and Leary, 1982).

Psychologists have also studied impression management in the context of mental and physical health .

In one such study, Braginsky et al. (1969) showed that those hospitalized with schizophrenia modify the severity of their “disordered” behavior depending on whether making a more or less “disordered” impression would be most beneficial to them (Leary, 2001).

Additional research on university students shows that people may exaggerate or even fabricate reports of psychological distress when doing so for their social goals.

Hypochondria appears to have self-presentational features where people convey impressions of illness and injury, when doing so helps to drive desired outcomes such as eliciting support or avoiding responsibilities (Leary, 2001).

People can also engage in dangerous behaviors for self-presentation reasons such as suntanning, unsafe sex, and fast driving. People may also refuse needed medical treatment if seeking this medical treatment compromises public image (Leary et al., 1994).

Key Components

There are several determinants of impression management, and people have many reasons to monitor and regulate how others perceive them.

For example, social relationships such as friendship, group membership, romantic relationships, desirable jobs, status, and influence rely partly on other people perceiving the individual as being a particular kind of person or having certain traits.

Because people’s goals depend on them making desired impressions over undesired impressions, people are concerned with the impressions other people form of them.

Although people appear to monitor how they come across ongoingly, the degree to which they are motivated to impression manage and the types of impressions they try to foster varies by situation and individuals (Leary, 2001).

Leary and Kowalski (1990) say that there are two processes that constitute impression management, each of which operate according to different principles and are affected by different situations and dispositional aspects. The first of these processes is impression motivation, and the second is impression construction.

Impression Motivation

There are three main factors that affect how much people are motivated to impression-manage in a situation (Leary and Kowalski, 1990):

(1) How much people believe their public images are relevant to them attaining their desired goals.

When people believe that their public image is relevant to them achieving their goals, they are generally more motivated to control how others perceive them (Leary, 2001).

Conversely, when the impressions of other people have few implications on one’s outcomes, that person’s motivation to impression-manage will be lower.

This is why people are more likely to impression manage in their interactions with powerful, high-status people than those who are less powerful and have lower status (Leary, 2001).

(2) How valuable the goals are: people are also more likely to impress and manage the more valuable the goals for which their public impressions are relevant (Leary, 2001).

(3) how much of a discrepancy there is between how they want to be perceived and how they believe others perceive them..

People are more highly motivated to impression-manage when there is a difference between how they want to be perceived and how they believe others perceive them.

For example, public scandals and embarrassing events that convey undesirable impressions can cause people to make self-presentational efforts to repair what they see as their damaged reputations (Leary, 2001).

Impression Construction

Features of the social situations that people find themselves in, as well as their own personalities, determine the nature of the impressions that they try to convey.

In particular, Leary and Kowalski (1990) name five sets of factors that are especially important in impression construction (Leary, 2001).

Two of these factors include how people’s relationships with themselves (self-concept and desired identity), and three involve how people relate to others (role constraints, target value, and current or potential social image) (Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Self-concept

The impressions that people try to create are influenced not only by social context but also by one’s own self-concept .

People usually want others to see them as “how they really are” (Leary, 2001), but this is in tension with the fact that people must deliberately manage their impressions in order to be viewed accurately by others (Goffman, 1959).

People’s self-concepts can also constrain the images they try to convey.

People often believe that it is unethical to present impressions of themselves different from how they really are and generally doubt that they would successfully be able to sustain a public image inconsistent with their actual characteristics (Leary, 2001).

This risk of failure in portraying a deceptive image and the accompanying social sanctions deter people from presenting impressions discrepant from how they see themselves (Gergen, 1968; Jones and Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 1980).

People can differ in how congruent their self-presentations are with their self-perceptions.

People who are high in public self-consciousness have less congruency between their private and public selves than those lower in public self-consciousness (Tunnell, 1984; Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Desired identity

People’s desired and undesired selves – how they wish to be and not be on an internal level – also influence the images that they try to project.

Schlenker (1985) defines a desirable identity image as what a person “would like to be and thinks he or she really can be, at least at his or her best.”

People have a tendency to manage their impressions so that their images coincide with their desired selves and stay away from images that coincide with their undesired selves (Ogilivie, 1987; Schlenker, 1985; Leary, 2001).

This happens when people publicly claim attributes consistent with their desired identity and openly reject identities that they do not want to be associated with.

For example, someone who abhors bigots may take every step possible to not appear bigoted, and Gergen and Taylor (1969) showed that high-status navel cadets did not conform to low-status navel cadets because they did not want to see themselves as conformists (Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Target value

people tailor their self-presentations to the values of the individuals whose perceptions they are concerned with.

This may lead to people sometimes fabricating identities that they think others will value.

However, more commonly, people selectively present truthful aspects of themselves that they believe coincide with the values of the person they are targeting the impression to and withhold information that they think others will value negatively (Leary, 2001).

Role constraints

the content of people’s self-presentations is affected by the roles that they take on and the norms of their social context.

In general, people want to convey impressions consistent with their roles and norms .

Many roles even carry self-presentational requirements around the kinds of impressions that the people who hold the roles should and should not convey (Leary, 2001).

Current or potential social image

People’s public image choices are also influenced by how they think they are perceived by others. As in impression motivation, self-presentational behaviors can often be aimed at dispelling undesired impressions that others hold about an individual.

When people believe that others have or are likely to develop an undesirable impression of them, they will typically try to refute that negative impression by showing that they are different from how others believe them to be.

When they are not able to refute this negative impression, they may project desirable impressions in other aspects of their identity (Leary, 2001).

Implications

In the presence of others, few of the behaviors that people make are unaffected by their desire to maintain certain impressions. Even when not explicitly trying to create a particular impression of themselves, people are constrained by concerns about their public image.

Generally, this manifests with people trying not to create undesired impressions in virtually all areas of social life (Leary, 2001).

Tedeschi et al. (1971) argued that phenomena that psychologists previously attributed to peoples’ need to have cognitive consistency actually reflected efforts to maintain an impression of consistency in others’ eyes.

Studies have supported Tedeschi and their colleagues’ suggestion that phenomena previously attributed to cognitive dissonance were actually affected by self-presentational processes (Schlenker, 1980).

Psychologists have applied self-presentation to their study of phenomena as far-ranging as conformity, aggression, prosocial behavior, leadership, negotiation, social influence, gender, stigmatization, and close relationships (Baumeister, 1982; Leary, 1995; Schlenker, 1980; Tedeschi, 1981).

Each of these studies shows that people’s efforts to make impressions on others affect these phenomena, and, ultimately, that concerns self-presentation in private social life.

For example, research shows that people are more likely to be pro-socially helpful when their helpfulness is publicized and behave more prosocially when they desire to repair a damaged social image by being helpful (Leary, 2001).

In a similar vein, many instances of aggressive behavior can be explained as self-presentational efforts to show that someone is willing to hurt others in order to get their way.

This can go as far as gender roles, for which evidence shows that men and women behave differently due to the kind of impressions that are socially expected of men and women.

Baumeister, R. F. (1982). A self-presentational view of social phenomena. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 3-26.

Braginsky, B. M., Braginsky, D. D., & Ring, K. (1969). Methods of madness: The mental hospital as a last resort. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Buss, A. H., & Briggs, S. (1984). Drama and the self in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1310-1324. Gergen, K. J. (1968). Personal consistency and the presentation of self. In C. Gordon & K. J. Gergen (Eds.), The self in social interaction (Vol. 1, pp. 299-308). New York: Wiley.

Gergen, K. J., & Taylor, M. G. (1969). Social expectancy and self-presentation in a status hierarchy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 5, 79-92.

Goffman, E. (1959). The moral career of the mental patient. Psychiatry, 22(2), 123-142.

• Goffman, E. (1963). Embarrassment and social organization.

Goffman, E. (1978). The presentation of self in everyday life (Vol. 21). London: Harmondsworth.

Goffman, E. (2002). The presentation of self in everyday life. 1959. Garden City, NY, 259.

Martey, R. M., & Consalvo, M. (2011). Performing the looking-glass self: Avatar appearance and group identity in Second Life. Popular Communication, 9 (3), 165-180.

Jones E E (1964) Ingratiation. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.

Jones, E. E., & Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general theory of strategic self-presentation. Psychological perspectives on the self, 1(1), 231-262.

Leary M R (1995) Self-presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behaior. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.

Leary, M. R.. Impression Management, Psychology of, in Smelser, N. J., & Baltes, P. B. (Eds.). (2001). International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (Vol. 11). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression management: A literature review and two-component model. Psychological bulletin, 107(1), 34.

Leary M R, Tchvidjian L R, Kraxberger B E 1994 Self-presentation may be hazardous to your health. Health Psychology 13: 461–70.

Ogilvie, D. M. (1987). The undesired self: A neglected variable in personality research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 379-385.

• Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management (Vol. 222). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Schlenker, B. R. (1985). Identity and self-identification. In B. R. Schlenker (Ed.), The self and social life (pp. 65-99). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schlenker, B. R., & Leary, M. R. (1982). Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization model. Psychological bulletin, 92(3), 641.

Tedeschi, J. T, Smith, R. B., Ill, & Brown, R. C., Jr. (1974). A reinterpretation of research on aggression. Psychological Bulletin, 81, 540- 563.

Tseëlon, E. (1992). Is the presented self sincere? Goffman, impression management and the postmodern self. Theory, culture & society, 9(2), 115-128.

Tunnell, G. (1984). The discrepancy between private and public selves: Public self-consciousness and its correlates. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48, 549-555.

Further Information

• Solomon, J. F., Solomon, A., Joseph, N. L., & Norton, S. D. (2013). Impression management, myth creation and fabrication in private social and environmental reporting: Insights from Erving Goffman. Accounting, organizations and society, 38(3), 195-213.
• Gardner, W. L., & Martinko, M. J. (1988). Impression management in organizations. Journal of management, 14(2), 321-338.
• Scheff, T. J. (2005). Looking‐Glass self: Goffman as symbolic interactionist. Symbolic interaction, 28(2), 147-166.

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IResearchNet

Self-Presentation

Self-presentation definition.

Self-presentation refers to how people attempt to present themselves to control or shape how others (called the audience) view them. It involves expressing oneself and behaving in ways that create a desired impression. Self-presentation is part of a broader set of behaviors called impression management. Impression management refers to the controlled presentation of information about all sorts of things, including information about other people or events. Self-presentation refers specifically to information about the self.

Self-Presentation History and Modern Usage

Early work on impression management focused on its manipulative, inauthentic uses that might typify a used car salesperson who lies to sell a car, or someone at a job interview who embellishes accomplishments to get a job. However, researchers now think of self-presentation more broadly as a pervasive aspect of life. Although some aspects of self-presentation are deliberate and effortful (and at times deceitful), other aspects are automatic and done with little or no conscious thought. For example, a woman may interact with many people during the day and may make different impressions on each person. When she starts her day at her apartment, she chats with her roommates and cleans up after breakfast, thereby presenting the image of being a good friend and responsible roommate. During classes, she responds to her professor’s questions and carefully takes notes, presenting the image of being a good student. Later that day, she calls her parents and tells them about her classes and other activities (although likely leaving out information about some activities), presenting the image of being a loving and responsible daughter. That night, she might go to a party or dancing with friends, presenting the image of being fun and easygoing. Although some aspects of these self-presentations may be deliberate and conscious, other aspects are not. For example, chatting with her roommates and cleaning up after breakfast may be habitual behaviors that are done with little conscious thought. Likewise, she may automatically hold the door open for an acquaintance or buy a cup of coffee for a friend. These behaviors, although perhaps not done consciously or with self-presentation in mind, nevertheless convey an image of the self to others.

Although people have the ability to present images that are false, self-presentations are often genuine; they reflect an attempt by the person to have others perceive him or her accurately, or at least consistent with how the person perceives himself or herself. Self-presentations can vary as a function of the audience; people present different aspects of themselves to different audiences or under different conditions. A man likely presents different aspects of himself to his close friends than he does to his elderly grandmother, and a woman may present a different image to her spouse than she does to her employer. This is not to say that these different images are false. Rather, they represent different aspects of the self. The self is much like a gem with multiple facets. The gem likely appears differently depending on the angle at which it is viewed. However, the various appearances are all genuine. Even if people present a self-image that they know to be false, they may begin to internalize the self-image and thereby eventually come to believe the self-pres

entation. For example, a man may initially present an image of being a good student without believing it to be genuine, but after attending all his classes for several weeks, visiting the professor during office hours, and asking questions during class, he may come to see himself as truly being a good student. This internalization process is most likely to occur when people make a public commitment to the self-image, when the behavior is at least somewhat consistent with their self-image, and when they receive positive feedback or other rewards for presenting the self-image.

Self-presentation is often directed to external audiences such as friends, lovers, employers, teachers, children, and even strangers. Self-presentation is more likely to be conscious when the presenter depends on the audience for some reward, expects to interact with the audience in the future, wants something from the audience, or values the audience’s approval. Yet self-presentation extends beyond audiences that are physically present to imagined audiences, and these imagined audiences can have distinct effects on behavior. A young man at a party might suddenly think about his parents and change his behavior from rambunctious to reserved. People sometimes even make self-presentations only for themselves. For instance, people want to claim certain identities, such as being fun, intelligent, kind, moral, and they may behave in line with these identities even in private.

Self-Presentation Goals

Self-presentation is inherently goal-directed; people present certain images because they benefit from the images in some way. The most obvious benefits are interpersonal, arising from getting others to do what one wants. A job candidate may convey an image of being hardworking and dependable to get a job; a salesperson may convey an image of being trustworthy and honest to achieve a sale. People may also benefit from their self-presentations by gaining respect, power, liking, or other desirable social rewards. Finally, people make certain impressions on others to maintain a sense of who they are, or their self-concept. For example, a man who wants to think of himself as a voracious reader might join a book club or volunteer at a library, or a woman who wishes to perceive herself as generous may contribute lavishly to a charitable cause. Even when there are few or no obvious benefits of a particular self-presentation, people may simply present an image that is consistent with the way they like to think about themselves, or at least the way they are accustomed to thinking about themselves.

Much of self-presentation is directed toward achieving one of two desirable images. First, people want to appear likeable. People like others who are attractive, interesting, and fun to be with. Thus, a sizable proportion of self-presentation revolves around developing, maintaining, and enhancing appearance and conveying and emphasizing characteristics that others desire, admire, and enjoy. Second, people want to appear competent. People like others who are skilled and able, and thus another sizable proportion of self-presentation revolves around conveying an image of competence. Yet, self-presentation is not so much about presenting desirable images as it is about presenting desired images, and some desired images are not necessarily desirable. For example, schoolyard bullies may present an image of being dangerous or intimidating to gain or maintain power over others. Some people present themselves as weak or infirmed (or exaggerate their weaknesses) to gain help from others. For instance, a member of a group project may display incompetence in the hope that other members will do more of the work, or a child may exaggerate illness to avoid going to school.

Self-Presentation Avenues

People self-present in a variety of ways. Perhaps most obviously, people self-present in what they say. These verbalizations can be direct claims of a particular image, such as when a person claims to be altruistic. They also can be indirect, such as when a person discloses personal behaviors or standards (e.g., “I volunteer at a hospital”). Other verbal presentations emerge when people express attitudes or beliefs. Divulging that one enjoys backpacking through Europe conveys the image that one is a world-traveler. Second, people self-present nonverbally in their physical appearance, body language, and other behavior. Smiling, eye contact, and nods of agreement can convey a wealth of information. Third, people self-present through the props they surround themselves with and through their associations. Driving an expensive car or flying first class conveys an image of having wealth, whereas an array of diplomas and certificates on one’s office walls conveys an image of education and expertise. Likewise, people judge others based on their associations. For example, being in the company of politicians or movie stars conveys an image of importance, and not surprisingly, many people display photographs of themselves with famous people. In a similar vein, high school students concerned with their status are often careful about which classmates they are seen and not seen with publicly. Being seen by others in the company of someone from a member of a disreputable group can raise questions about one’s own social standing.

Self-Presentation Pitfalls

Self-presentation is most successful when the image presented is consistent with what the audience thinks or knows to be true. The more the image presented differs from the image believed or anticipated by the audience, the less willing the audience will be to accept the image. For example, the lower a student’s grade is on the first exam, the more difficulty he or she will have in convincing a professor that he or she will earn an A on the next exam. Self-presentations are constrained by audience knowledge. The more the audience knows about a person, the less freedom the person has in claiming a particular identity. An audience that knows very little about a person will be more accepting of whatever identity the person conveys, whereas an audience that knows a great deal about a person will be less accepting.

People engaging in self-presentation sometimes encounter difficulties that undermine their ability to convey a desired image. First, people occasionally encounter the multiple audience problem, in which they must simultaneously present two conflicting images. For example, a student while walking with friends who know only her rebellious, impetuous side may run into her professor who knows only her serious, conscientious side. The student faces the dilemma of conveying the conflicting images of rebellious friend and serious student. When both audiences are present, the student must try to behave in a way that is consistent with how her friends view her, but also in a way that is consistent with how her professor views her. Second, people occasionally encounter challenges to their self-presentations. The audience may not believe the image the person presents. Challenges are most likely to arise when people are managing impressions through self-descriptions and the self-descriptions are inconsistent with other evidence. For example, a man who claims to be good driver faces a self-presentational dilemma if he is ticketed or gets in an automobile accident. Third, self-presentations can fail when people lack the cognitive resources to present effectively because, for example, they are tired, anxious, or distracted. For instance, a woman may yawn uncontrollably or reflexively check her watch while talking to a boring classmate, unintentionally conveying an image of disinterest.

Some of the most important images for people to convey are also the hardest. As noted earlier, among the most important images people want to communicate are likeability and competence. Perhaps because these images are so important and are often rewarded, audiences may be skeptical of accepting direct claims of likeability and competence from presenters, thinking that the person is seeking personal gain. Thus, people must resort to indirect routes to create these images, and the indirect routes can be misinterpreted. For example, the student who sits in the front row of the class and asks a lot of questions may be trying to project an image of being a competent student but may be perceived negatively as a teacher’s pet by fellow students.

Finally, there is a dark side to self-presentation. In some instances, the priority people place on their appearances or images can threaten their health. People who excessively tan are putting a higher priority on their appearance (e.g., being tan) than on their health (e.g., taking precautions to avoid skin cancer). Similarly, although condoms help protect against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy, self-presentational concerns may dissuade partners or potential partners from discussing, carrying, or using condoms. Women may fear that carrying condoms makes them seem promiscuous or easy, whereas men may fear that carrying condoms makes them seem presumptuous, as if they are expecting to have sex. Self-presentational concerns may also influence interactions with health care providers and may lead people to delay or avoid embarrassing medical tests and procedures or treatments for conditions that are embarrassing. For example, people may be reluctant to seek tests or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, loss of bladder control, mental disorders, mental decline, or other conditions associated with weakness or incompetence. Finally, concerns with social acceptance may prompt young people to engage in risky behaviors such as excessive alcohol consumption, sexual promiscuity, or juvenile delinquency.

References:

• Jones, E. E., Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general theory of strategic self-presentation. In J. Suls (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on the self (Vol. 1, pp. 231-260). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Leary, M. R. (1996). Self-presentation: Impression management and interpersonal behavior. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Leary, M. R., Tchividjian, L. R., & Kraxberger, B. E. (1994). Self-presentation can be hazardous to your health: Impression management and health risk. Health Psychology, 13, 461-470.
• Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management: The self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

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2.3 Perceiving and Presenting Self

Learning objectives.

• Define self-concept and discuss how we develop our self-concept.
• Define self-esteem and discuss how we develop self-esteem.
• Explain how social comparison theory and self-discrepancy theory influence self-perception.
• Discuss how social norms, family, culture, and media influence self-perception.
• Define self-presentation and discuss common self-presentation strategies.

Just as our perception of others affects how we communicate, so does our perception of ourselves. But what influences our self-perception? How much of our self is a product of our own making and how much of it is constructed based on how others react to us? How do we present ourselves to others in ways that maintain our sense of self or challenge how others see us? We will begin to answer these questions in this section as we explore self-concept, self-esteem, and self-presentation.

Self-Concept

Self-concept refers to the overall idea of who a person thinks he or she is. If I said, “Tell me who you are,” your answers would be clues as to how you see yourself, your self-concept. Each person has an overall self-concept that might be encapsulated in a short list of overarching characteristics that he or she finds important. But each person’s self-concept is also influenced by context, meaning we think differently about ourselves depending on the situation we are in. In some situations, personal characteristics, such as our abilities, personality, and other distinguishing features, will best describe who we are. You might consider yourself laid back, traditional, funny, open minded, or driven, or you might label yourself a leader or a thrill seeker. In other situations, our self-concept may be tied to group or cultural membership. For example, you might consider yourself a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, a Southerner, or a member of the track team.

Men are more likely than women to include group memberships in their self-concept descriptions.

Stefano Ravalli – In control – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Our self-concept is also formed through our interactions with others and their reactions to us. The concept of the looking glass self explains that we see ourselves reflected in other people’s reactions to us and then form our self-concept based on how we believe other people see us (Cooley, 1902). This reflective process of building our self-concept is based on what other people have actually said, such as “You’re a good listener,” and other people’s actions, such as coming to you for advice. These thoughts evoke emotional responses that feed into our self-concept. For example, you may think, “I’m glad that people can count on me to listen to their problems.”

We also develop our self-concept through comparisons to other people. Social comparison theory states that we describe and evaluate ourselves in terms of how we compare to other people. Social comparisons are based on two dimensions: superiority/inferiority and similarity/difference (Hargie, 2011). In terms of superiority and inferiority, we evaluate characteristics like attractiveness, intelligence, athletic ability, and so on. For example, you may judge yourself to be more intelligent than your brother or less athletic than your best friend, and these judgments are incorporated into your self-concept. This process of comparison and evaluation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can have negative consequences if our reference group isn’t appropriate. Reference groups are the groups we use for social comparison, and they typically change based on what we are evaluating. In terms of athletic ability, many people choose unreasonable reference groups with which to engage in social comparison. If a man wants to get into better shape and starts an exercise routine, he may be discouraged by his difficulty keeping up with the aerobics instructor or running partner and judge himself as inferior, which could negatively affect his self-concept. Using as a reference group people who have only recently started a fitness program but have shown progress could help maintain a more accurate and hopefully positive self-concept.

We also engage in social comparison based on similarity and difference. Since self-concept is context specific, similarity may be desirable in some situations and difference more desirable in others. Factors like age and personality may influence whether or not we want to fit in or stand out. Although we compare ourselves to others throughout our lives, adolescent and teen years usually bring new pressure to be similar to or different from particular reference groups. Think of all the cliques in high school and how people voluntarily and involuntarily broke off into groups based on popularity, interest, culture, or grade level. Some kids in your high school probably wanted to fit in with and be similar to other people in the marching band but be different from the football players. Conversely, athletes were probably more apt to compare themselves, in terms of similar athletic ability, to other athletes rather than kids in show choir. But social comparison can be complicated by perceptual influences. As we learned earlier, we organize information based on similarity and difference, but these patterns don’t always hold true. Even though students involved in athletics and students involved in arts may seem very different, a dancer or singer may also be very athletic, perhaps even more so than a member of the football team. As with other aspects of perception, there are positive and negative consequences of social comparison.

We generally want to know where we fall in terms of ability and performance as compared to others, but what people do with this information and how it affects self-concept varies. Not all people feel they need to be at the top of the list, but some won’t stop until they get the high score on the video game or set a new school record in a track-and-field event. Some people strive to be first chair in the clarinet section of the orchestra, while another person may be content to be second chair. The education system promotes social comparison through grades and rewards such as honor rolls and dean’s lists. Although education and privacy laws prevent me from displaying each student’s grade on a test or paper for the whole class to see, I do typically report the aggregate grades, meaning the total number of As, Bs, Cs, and so on. This doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy rights, but it allows students to see where they fell in the distribution. This type of social comparison can be used as motivation. The student who was one of only three out of twenty-three to get a D on the exam knows that most of her classmates are performing better than she is, which may lead her to think, “If they can do it, I can do it.” But social comparison that isn’t reasoned can have negative effects and result in negative thoughts like “Look at how bad I did. Man, I’m stupid!” These negative thoughts can lead to negative behaviors, because we try to maintain internal consistency, meaning we act in ways that match up with our self-concept. So if the student begins to question her academic abilities and then incorporates an assessment of herself as a “bad student” into her self-concept, she may then behave in ways consistent with that, which is only going to worsen her academic performance. Additionally, a student might be comforted to learn that he isn’t the only person who got a D and then not feel the need to try to improve, since he has company. You can see in this example that evaluations we place on our self-concept can lead to cycles of thinking and acting. These cycles relate to self-esteem and self-efficacy, which are components of our self-concept.

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem refers to the judgments and evaluations we make about our self-concept. While self-concept is a broad description of the self, self-esteem is a more specifically an evaluation of the self (Byrne, 1996). If I again prompted you to “Tell me who you are,” and then asked you to evaluate (label as good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable) each of the things you listed about yourself, I would get clues about your self-esteem. Like self-concept, self-esteem has general and specific elements. Generally, some people are more likely to evaluate themselves positively while others are more likely to evaluate themselves negatively (Brockner, 1988). More specifically, our self-esteem varies across our life span and across contexts.

Self-esteem varies throughout our lives, but some people generally think more positively of themselves and some people think more negatively.

RHiNO NEAL – [trophy] – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

How we judge ourselves affects our communication and our behaviors, but not every negative or positive judgment carries the same weight. The negative evaluation of a trait that isn’t very important for our self-concept will likely not result in a loss of self-esteem. For example, I am not very good at drawing. While I appreciate drawing as an art form, I don’t consider drawing ability to be a very big part of my self-concept. If someone critiqued my drawing ability, my self-esteem wouldn’t take a big hit. I do consider myself a good teacher, however, and I have spent and continue to spend considerable time and effort on improving my knowledge of teaching and my teaching skills. If someone critiqued my teaching knowledge and/or abilities, my self-esteem would definitely be hurt. This doesn’t mean that we can’t be evaluated on something we find important. Even though teaching is very important to my self-concept, I am regularly evaluated on it. Every semester, I am evaluated by my students, and every year, I am evaluated by my dean, department chair, and colleagues. Most of that feedback is in the form of constructive criticism, which can still be difficult to receive, but when taken in the spirit of self-improvement, it is valuable and may even enhance our self-concept and self-esteem. In fact, in professional contexts, people with higher self-esteem are more likely to work harder based on negative feedback, are less negatively affected by work stress, are able to handle workplace conflict better, and are better able to work independently and solve problems (Brockner, 1988). Self-esteem isn’t the only factor that contributes to our self-concept; perceptions about our competence also play a role in developing our sense of self.

Self-Efficacy refers to the judgments people make about their ability to perform a task within a specific context (Bandura, 1997). As you can see in Figure 2.2 “Relationship between Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Self-Concept” , judgments about our self-efficacy influence our self-esteem, which influences our self-concept. The following example also illustrates these interconnections.

Figure 2.2 Relationship between Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Self-Concept

Pedro did a good job on his first college speech. During a meeting with his professor, Pedro indicates that he is confident going into the next speech and thinks he will do well. This skill-based assessment is an indication that Pedro has a high level of self-efficacy related to public speaking. If he does well on the speech, the praise from his classmates and professor will reinforce his self-efficacy and lead him to positively evaluate his speaking skills, which will contribute to his self-esteem. By the end of the class, Pedro likely thinks of himself as a good public speaker, which may then become an important part of his self-concept. Throughout these points of connection, it’s important to remember that self-perception affects how we communicate, behave, and perceive other things. Pedro’s increased feeling of self-efficacy may give him more confidence in his delivery, which will likely result in positive feedback that reinforces his self-perception. He may start to perceive his professor more positively since they share an interest in public speaking, and he may begin to notice other people’s speaking skills more during class presentations and public lectures. Over time, he may even start to think about changing his major to communication or pursuing career options that incorporate public speaking, which would further integrate being “a good public speaker” into his self-concept. You can hopefully see that these interconnections can create powerful positive or negative cycles. While some of this process is under our control, much of it is also shaped by the people in our lives.

The verbal and nonverbal feedback we get from people affect our feelings of self-efficacy and our self-esteem. As we saw in Pedro’s example, being given positive feedback can increase our self-efficacy, which may make us more likely to engage in a similar task in the future (Hargie, 2011). Obviously, negative feedback can lead to decreased self-efficacy and a declining interest in engaging with the activity again. In general, people adjust their expectations about their abilities based on feedback they get from others. Positive feedback tends to make people raise their expectations for themselves and negative feedback does the opposite, which ultimately affects behaviors and creates the cycle. When feedback from others is different from how we view ourselves, additional cycles may develop that impact self-esteem and self-concept.

Self-discrepancy theory states that people have beliefs about and expectations for their actual and potential selves that do not always match up with what they actually experience (Higgins, 1987). To understand this theory, we have to understand the different “selves” that make up our self-concept, which are the actual, ideal, and ought selves. The actual self consists of the attributes that you or someone else believes you actually possess. The ideal self consists of the attributes that you or someone else would like you to possess. The ought self consists of the attributes you or someone else believes you should possess.

These different selves can conflict with each other in various combinations. Discrepancies between the actual and ideal/ought selves can be motivating in some ways and prompt people to act for self-improvement. For example, if your ought self should volunteer more for the local animal shelter, then your actual self may be more inclined to do so. Discrepancies between the ideal and ought selves can be especially stressful. For example, many professional women who are also mothers have an ideal view of self that includes professional success and advancement. They may also have an ought self that includes a sense of duty and obligation to be a full-time mother. The actual self may be someone who does OK at both but doesn’t quite live up to the expectations of either. These discrepancies do not just create cognitive unease—they also lead to emotional, behavioral, and communicative changes.

People who feel that it’s their duty to recycle but do not actually do it will likely experience a discrepancy between their actual and ought selves.

Matt Martin – Recycle – CC BY-NC 2.0.

When we compare the actual self to the expectations of ourselves and others, we can see particular patterns of emotional and behavioral effects. When our actual self doesn’t match up with our own ideals of self, we are not obtaining our own desires and hopes, which can lead to feelings of dejection including disappointment, dissatisfaction, and frustration. For example, if your ideal self has no credit card debt and your actual self does, you may be frustrated with your lack of financial discipline and be motivated to stick to your budget and pay off your credit card bills.

When our actual self doesn’t match up with other people’s ideals for us, we may not be obtaining significant others’ desires and hopes, which can lead to feelings of dejection including shame, embarrassment, and concern for losing the affection or approval of others. For example, if a significant other sees you as an “A” student and you get a 2.8 GPA your first year of college, then you may be embarrassed to share your grades with that person.

When our actual self doesn’t match up with what we think other people think we should obtain, we are not living up to the ought self that we think others have constructed for us, which can lead to feelings of agitation, feeling threatened, and fearing potential punishment. For example, if your parents think you should follow in their footsteps and take over the family business, but your actual self wants to go into the military, then you may be unsure of what to do and fear being isolated from the family.

Finally, when our actual self doesn’t match up with what we think we should obtain, we are not meeting what we see as our duties or obligations, which can lead to feelings of agitation including guilt, weakness, and a feeling that we have fallen short of our moral standard (Higgins, 1987). For example, if your ought self should volunteer more for the local animal shelter, then your actual self may be more inclined to do so due to the guilt of reading about the increasing number of animals being housed at the facility. The following is a review of the four potential discrepancies between selves:

• Actual vs. own ideals. We have an overall feeling that we are not obtaining our desires and hopes, which leads to feelings of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and frustration.
• Actual vs. others’ ideals. We have an overall feeling that we are not obtaining significant others’ desires and hopes for us, which leads to feelings of shame and embarrassment.
• Actual vs. others’ ought. We have an overall feeling that we are not meeting what others see as our duties and obligations, which leads to feelings of agitation including fear of potential punishment.
• Actual vs. own ought. We have an overall feeling that we are not meeting our duties and obligations, which can lead to a feeling that we have fallen short of our own moral standards.

Influences on Self-Perception

We have already learned that other people influence our self-concept and self-esteem. While interactions we have with individuals and groups are definitely important to consider, we must also note the influence that larger, more systemic forces have on our self-perception. Social and family influences, culture, and the media all play a role in shaping who we think we are and how we feel about ourselves. Although these are powerful socializing forces, there are ways to maintain some control over our self-perception.

Social and Family Influences

Various forces help socialize us into our respective social and cultural groups and play a powerful role in presenting us with options about who we can be. While we may like to think that our self-perception starts with a blank canvas, our perceptions are limited by our experiences and various social and cultural contexts.

Parents and peers shape our self-perceptions in positive and negative ways. Feedback that we get from significant others, which includes close family, can lead to positive views of self (Hargie, 2011). In the past few years, however, there has been a public discussion and debate about how much positive reinforcement people should give to others, especially children. The following questions have been raised: Do we have current and upcoming generations that have been overpraised? Is the praise given warranted? What are the positive and negative effects of praise? What is the end goal of the praise? Let’s briefly look at this discussion and its connection to self-perception.

Some experts have warned that overpraising children can lead to distorted self-concepts.

Rain0975 – participation award – CC BY-ND 2.0.

Whether praise is warranted or not is very subjective and specific to each person and context, but in general there have been questions raised about the potential negative effects of too much praise. Motivation is the underlying force that drives us to do things. Sometimes we are intrinsically motivated, meaning we want to do something for the love of doing it or the resulting internal satisfaction. Other times we are extrinsically motivated, meaning we do something to receive a reward or avoid punishment. If you put effort into completing a short documentary for a class because you love filmmaking and editing, you have been largely motivated by intrinsic forces. If you complete the documentary because you want an “A” and know that if you fail your parents will not give you money for your spring break trip, then you are motivated by extrinsic factors. Both can, of course, effectively motivate us. Praise is a form of extrinsic reward, and if there is an actual reward associated with the praise, like money or special recognition, some people speculate that intrinsic motivation will suffer. But what’s so good about intrinsic motivation? Intrinsic motivation is more substantial and long-lasting than extrinsic motivation and can lead to the development of a work ethic and sense of pride in one’s abilities. Intrinsic motivation can move people to accomplish great things over long periods of time and be happy despite the effort and sacrifices made. Extrinsic motivation dies when the reward stops. Additionally, too much praise can lead people to have a misguided sense of their abilities. College professors who are reluctant to fail students who produce failing work may be setting those students up to be shocked when their supervisor critiques their abilities or output once they get into a professional context (Hargie, 2011).

There are cultural differences in the amount of praise and positive feedback that teachers and parents give their children. For example, teachers give less positive reinforcement in Japanese and Taiwanese classrooms than do teachers in US classrooms. Chinese and Kenyan parents do not regularly praise their children because they fear it may make them too individualistic, rude, or arrogant (Wierzbicka, 2004). So the phenomenon of overpraising isn’t universal, and the debate over its potential effects is not resolved.

Research has also found that communication patterns develop between parents and children that are common to many verbally and physically abusive relationships. Such patterns have negative effects on a child’s self-efficacy and self-esteem (Morgan & Wilson, 2007). As you’ll recall from our earlier discussion, attributions are links we make to identify the cause of a behavior. In the case of aggressive or abusive parents, they are not as able to distinguish between mistakes and intentional behaviors, often seeing honest mistakes as intended and reacting negatively to the child. Such parents also communicate generally negative evaluations to their child by saying, for example, “You can’t do anything right!” or “You’re a bad girl.” When children do exhibit positive behaviors, abusive parents are more likely to use external attributions that diminish the achievement of the child by saying, for example, “You only won because the other team was off their game.” In general, abusive parents have unpredictable reactions to their children’s positive and negative behavior, which creates an uncertain and often scary climate for a child that can lead to lower self-esteem and erratic or aggressive behavior. The cycles of praise and blame are just two examples of how the family as a socializing force can influence our self-perceptions. Culture also influences how we see ourselves.

How people perceive themselves varies across cultures. For example, many cultures exhibit a phenomenon known as the self-enhancement bias , meaning that we tend to emphasize our desirable qualities relative to other people (Loughnan et al., 2011). But the degree to which people engage in self-enhancement varies. A review of many studies in this area found that people in Western countries such as the United States were significantly more likely to self-enhance than people in countries such as Japan. Many scholars explain this variation using a common measure of cultural variation that claims people in individualistic cultures are more likely to engage in competition and openly praise accomplishments than people in collectivistic cultures. The difference in self-enhancement has also been tied to economics, with scholars arguing that people in countries with greater income inequality are more likely to view themselves as superior to others or want to be perceived as superior to others (even if they don’t have economic wealth) in order to conform to the country’s values and norms. This holds true because countries with high levels of economic inequality, like the United States, typically value competition and the right to boast about winning or succeeding, while countries with more economic equality, like Japan, have a cultural norm of modesty (Loughnan, 2011).

Race also plays a role in self-perception. For example, positive self-esteem and self-efficacy tend to be higher in African American adolescent girls than Caucasian girls (Stockton et al., 2009). In fact, more recent studies have discounted much of the early research on race and self-esteem that purported that African Americans of all ages have lower self-esteem than whites. Self-perception becomes more complex when we consider biracial individuals—more specifically those born to couples comprising an African American and a white parent (Bowles, 1993). In such cases, it is challenging for biracial individuals to embrace both of their heritages, and social comparison becomes more difficult due to diverse and sometimes conflicting reference groups. Since many biracial individuals identify as and are considered African American by society, living and working within a black community can help foster more positive self-perceptions in these biracial individuals. Such a community offers a more nurturing environment and a buffer zone from racist attitudes but simultaneously distances biracial individuals from their white identity. Conversely, immersion into a predominantly white community and separation from a black community can lead biracial individuals to internalize negative views of people of color and perhaps develop a sense of inferiority. Gender intersects with culture and biracial identity to create different experiences and challenges for biracial men and women. Biracial men have more difficulty accepting their potential occupational limits, especially if they have white fathers, and biracial women have difficulty accepting their black features, such as hair and facial features. All these challenges lead to a sense of being marginalized from both ethnic groups and interfere in the development of positive self-esteem and a stable self-concept.

Biracial individuals may have challenges with self-perception as they try to integrate both racial identities into their self-concept.

Javcon117* – End of Summer Innocence – CC BY-SA 2.0.

There are some general differences in terms of gender and self-perception that relate to self-concept, self-efficacy, and envisioning ideal selves. As with any cultural differences, these are generalizations that have been supported by research, but they do not represent all individuals within a group. Regarding self-concept, men are more likely to describe themselves in terms of their group membership, and women are more likely to include references to relationships in their self-descriptions. For example, a man may note that he is a Tarheel fan, a boat enthusiast, or a member of the Rotary Club, and a woman may note that she is a mother of two or a loyal friend.

Regarding self-efficacy, men tend to have higher perceptions of self-efficacy than women (Hargie, 2011). In terms of actual and ideal selves, men and women in a variety of countries both described their ideal self as more masculine (Best & Thomas, 2004). As was noted earlier, gender differences are interesting to study but are very often exaggerated beyond the actual variations. Socialization and internalization of societal norms for gender differences accounts for much more of our perceived differences than do innate or natural differences between genders. These gender norms may be explicitly stated—for example, a mother may say to her son, “Boys don’t play with dolls”—or they may be more implicit, with girls being encouraged to pursue historically feminine professions like teaching or nursing without others actually stating the expectation.

The representations we see in the media affect our self-perception. The vast majority of media images include idealized representations of attractiveness. Despite the fact that the images of people we see in glossy magazines and on movie screens are not typically what we see when we look at the people around us in a classroom, at work, or at the grocery store, many of us continue to hold ourselves to an unrealistic standard of beauty and attractiveness. Movies, magazines, and television shows are filled with beautiful people, and less attractive actors, when they are present in the media, are typically portrayed as the butt of jokes, villains, or only as background extras (Patzer, 2008). Aside from overall attractiveness, the media also offers narrow representations of acceptable body weight.

Researchers have found that only 12 percent of prime-time characters are overweight, which is dramatically less than the national statistics for obesity among the actual US population (Patzer, 2008). Further, an analysis of how weight is discussed on prime-time sitcoms found that heavier female characters were often the targets of negative comments and jokes that audience members responded to with laughter. Conversely, positive comments about women’s bodies were related to their thinness. In short, the heavier the character, the more negative the comments, and the thinner the character, the more positive the comments. The same researchers analyzed sitcoms for content regarding male characters’ weight and found that although comments regarding their weight were made, they were fewer in number and not as negative, ultimately supporting the notion that overweight male characters are more accepted in media than overweight female characters. Much more attention has been paid in recent years to the potential negative effects of such narrow media representations. The following “Getting Critical” box explores the role of media in the construction of body image.

In terms of self-concept, media representations offer us guidance on what is acceptable or unacceptable and valued or not valued in our society. Mediated messages, in general, reinforce cultural stereotypes related to race, gender, age, sexual orientation, ability, and class. People from historically marginalized groups must look much harder than those in the dominant groups to find positive representations of their identities in media. As a critical thinker, it is important to question media messages and to examine who is included and who is excluded.

Advertising in particular encourages people to engage in social comparison, regularly communicating to us that we are inferior because we lack a certain product or that we need to change some aspect of our life to keep up with and be similar to others. For example, for many years advertising targeted to women instilled in them a fear of having a dirty house, selling them products that promised to keep their house clean, make their family happy, and impress their friends and neighbors. Now messages tell us to fear becoming old or unattractive, selling products to keep our skin tight and clear, which will in turn make us happy and popular.

“Getting Critical”

Body Image and Self-Perception

Take a look at any magazine, television show, or movie and you will most likely see very beautiful people. When you look around you in your daily life, there are likely not as many glamorous and gorgeous people. Scholars and media critics have critiqued this discrepancy for decades because it has contributed to many social issues and public health issues ranging from body dysmorphic disorder, to eating disorders, to lowered self-esteem.

Much of the media is driven by advertising, and the business of media has been to perpetuate a “culture of lack” (Dworkin & Wachs, 2009). This means that we are constantly told, via mediated images, that we lack something. In short, advertisements often tell us we don’t have enough money, enough beauty, or enough material possessions. Over the past few decades, women’s bodies in the media have gotten smaller and thinner, while men’s bodies have gotten bigger and more muscular. At the same time, the US population has become dramatically more obese. As research shows that men and women are becoming more and more dissatisfied with their bodies, which ultimately affects their self-concept and self-esteem, health and beauty product lines proliferate and cosmetic surgeries and other types of enhancements become more and more popular. From young children to older adults, people are becoming more aware of and oftentimes unhappy with their bodies, which results in a variety of self-perception problems.

• How do you think the media influences your self-perception and body image?
• Describe the typical man that is portrayed in the media. Describe the typical woman that is portrayed in the media. What impressions do these typical bodies make on others? What are the potential positive and negative effects of the way the media portrays the human body?
• Find an example of an “atypical” body represented in the media (a magazine, TV show, or movie). Is this person presented in a positive, negative, or neutral way? Why do you think this person was chosen?

Self-Presentation

How we perceive ourselves manifests in how we present ourselves to others. Self-presentation is the process of strategically concealing or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions (Human et al., 2012). We engage in this process daily and for different reasons. Although people occasionally intentionally deceive others in the process of self-presentation, in general we try to make a good impression while still remaining authentic. Since self-presentation helps meet our instrumental, relational, and identity needs, we stand to lose quite a bit if we are caught intentionally misrepresenting ourselves. In May of 2012, Yahoo!’s CEO resigned after it became known that he stated on official documents that he had two college degrees when he actually only had one. In a similar incident, a woman who had long served as the dean of admissions for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology was dismissed from her position after it was learned that she had only attended one year of college and had falsely indicated she had a bachelor’s and master’s degree (Webber & Korn, 2012). Such incidents clearly show that although people can get away with such false self-presentation for a while, the eventual consequences of being found out are dire. As communicators, we sometimes engage in more subtle forms of inauthentic self-presentation. For example, a person may state or imply that they know more about a subject or situation than they actually do in order to seem smart or “in the loop.” During a speech, a speaker works on a polished and competent delivery to distract from a lack of substantive content. These cases of strategic self-presentation may not ever be found out, but communicators should still avoid them as they do not live up to the standards of ethical communication.

Consciously and competently engaging in self-presentation can have benefits because we can provide others with a more positive and accurate picture of who we are. People who are skilled at impression management are typically more engaging and confident, which allows others to pick up on more cues from which to form impressions (Human et al., 2012). Being a skilled self-presenter draws on many of the practices used by competent communicators, including becoming a higher self-monitor. When self-presentation skills and self-monitoring skills combine, communicators can simultaneously monitor their own expressions, the reaction of others, and the situational and social context (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002). Sometimes people get help with their self-presentation. Although most people can’t afford or wouldn’t think of hiring an image consultant, some people have started generously donating their self-presentation expertise to help others. Many people who have been riding the tough job market for a year or more get discouraged and may consider giving up on their job search.

People who have been out of work for a while may have difficulty finding the motivation to engage in the self-presentation behaviors needed to form favorable impressions.

Steve Petrucelli – Interview Time! – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

There are two main types of self-presentation: prosocial and self-serving (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002). Prosocial self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as a role model and make a person more likable and attractive. For example, a supervisor may call on her employees to uphold high standards for business ethics, model that behavior in her own actions, and compliment others when they exemplify those standards. Self-serving self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as highly skilled, willing to challenge others, and someone not to be messed with. For example, a supervisor may publicly take credit for the accomplishments of others or publicly critique an employee who failed to meet a particular standard. In summary, prosocial strategies are aimed at benefiting others, while self-serving strategies benefit the self at the expense of others.

In general, we strive to present a public image that matches up with our self-concept, but we can also use self-presentation strategies to enhance our self-concept (Hargie, 2011). When we present ourselves in order to evoke a positive evaluative response, we are engaging in self-enhancement. In the pursuit of self-enhancement, a person might try to be as appealing as possible in a particular area or with a particular person to gain feedback that will enhance one’s self-esteem. For example, a singer might train and practice for weeks before singing in front of a well-respected vocal coach but not invest as much effort in preparing to sing in front of friends. Although positive feedback from friends is beneficial, positive feedback from an experienced singer could enhance a person’s self-concept. Self-enhancement can be productive and achieved competently, or it can be used inappropriately. Using self-enhancement behaviors just to gain the approval of others or out of self-centeredness may lead people to communicate in ways that are perceived as phony or overbearing and end up making an unfavorable impression (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002).

“Getting Plugged In”

Self-Presentation Online: Social Media, Digital Trails, and Your Reputation

Although social networking has long been a way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, the advent of social media has made the process of making connections and those all-important first impressions much more complex. Just looking at Facebook as an example, we can clearly see that the very acts of constructing a profile, posting status updates, “liking” certain things, and sharing various information via Facebook features and apps is self-presentation (Kim & Lee, 2011). People also form impressions based on the number of friends we have and the photos and posts that other people tag us in. All this information floating around can be difficult to manage. So how do we manage the impressions we make digitally given that there is a permanent record?

Research shows that people overall engage in positive and honest self-presentation on Facebook (Kim & Lee, 2011). Since people know how visible the information they post is, they may choose to only reveal things they think will form favorable impressions. But the mediated nature of Facebook also leads some people to disclose more personal information than they might otherwise in such a public or semipublic forum. These hyperpersonal disclosures run the risk of forming negative impressions based on who sees them. In general, the ease of digital communication, not just on Facebook, has presented new challenges for our self-control and information management. Sending someone a sexually provocative image used to take some effort before the age of digital cameras, but now “sexting” an explicit photo only takes a few seconds. So people who would have likely not engaged in such behavior before are more tempted to now, and it is the desire to present oneself as desirable or cool that leads people to send photos they may later regret (DiBlasio, 2012). In fact, new technology in the form of apps is trying to give people a little more control over the exchange of digital information. An iPhone app called “Snapchat” allows users to send photos that will only be visible for a few seconds. Although this isn’t a guaranteed safety net, the demand for such apps is increasing, which illustrates the point that we all now leave digital trails of information that can be useful in terms of our self-presentation but can also create new challenges in terms of managing the information floating around from which others may form impressions of us.

• What impressions do you want people to form of you based on the information they can see on your Facebook page?
• Have you ever used social media or the Internet to do “research” on a person? What things would you find favorable and unfavorable?
• Do you have any guidelines you follow regarding what information about yourself you will put online or not? If so, what are they? If not, why?

Key Takeaways

• Our self-concept is the overall idea of who we think we are. It is developed through our interactions with others and through social comparison that allows us to compare our beliefs and behaviors to others.
• Our self-esteem is based on the evaluations and judgments we make about various characteristics of our self-concept. It is developed through an assessment and evaluation of our various skills and abilities, known as self-efficacy, and through a comparison and evaluation of who we are, who we would like to be, and who we should be (self-discrepancy theory).
• Social comparison theory and self-discrepancy theory affect our self-concept and self-esteem because through comparison with others and comparison of our actual, ideal, and ought selves we make judgments about who we are and our self-worth. These judgments then affect how we communicate and behave.
• Socializing forces like family, culture, and media affect our self-perception because they give us feedback on who we are. This feedback can be evaluated positively or negatively and can lead to positive or negative patterns that influence our self-perception and then our communication.
• Self-presentation refers to the process of strategically concealing and/or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions. Prosocial self-presentation is intended to benefit others and self-serving self-presentation is intended to benefit the self at the expense of others. People also engage in self-enhancement, which is a self-presentation strategy by which people intentionally seek out positive evaluations.
• Make a list of characteristics that describe who you are (your self-concept). After looking at the list, see if you can come up with a few words that summarize the list to narrow in on the key features of your self-concept. Go back over the first list and evaluate each characteristic, for example noting whether it is something you do well/poorly, something that is good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable. Is the overall list more positive or more negative? After doing these exercises, what have you learned about your self-concept and self-esteem?
• Discuss at least one time in which you had a discrepancy or tension between two of the three selves described by self-discrepancy theory (the actual, ideal, and ought selves). What effect did this discrepancy have on your self-concept and/or self-esteem?
• Take one of the socializing forces discussed (family, culture, or media) and identify at least one positive and one negative influence that it/they have had on your self-concept and/or self-esteem.
• Getting integrated: Discuss some ways that you might strategically engage in self-presentation to influence the impressions of others in an academic, a professional, a personal, and a civic context.

Bandura, A., Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York, NY: W. H. Freeman, 1997).

Best, D. L. and Jennifer J. Thomas, “Cultural Diversity and Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” in The Psychology of Gender, 2nd ed., eds. Alice H. Eagly, Anne E. Beall, and Robert J. Sternberg (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 2004), 296–327.

Bowles, D. D., “Biracial Identity: Children Born to African-American and White Couples,” Clinical Social Work Journal 21, no. 4 (1993): 418–22.

Brockner, J., Self-Esteem at Work (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988), 11.

Byrne, B. M., Measuring Self-Concept across the Life Span: Issues and Instrumentation (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1996), 5.

Cooley, C., Human Nature and the Social Order (New York, NY: Scribner, 1902).

DiBlasio, N., “Demand for Photo-Erasing iPhone App Heats up Sexting Debate,” USA Today , May 7, 2012, accessed June 6, 2012, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/05/demand-for-photo-erasing-iphone-app-heats-up-sexting-debate/1 .

Dworkin, S. L. and Faye Linda Wachs, Body Panic (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), 2.

Hargie, O., Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 261.

Higgins, E. T., “Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect,” Psychological Review 94, no. 3 (1987): 320–21.

Human, L. J., et al., “Your Best Self Helps Reveal Your True Self: Positive Self-Presentation Leads to More Accurate Personality Impressions,” Social Psychological and Personality Sciences 3, no. 1 (2012): 23.

Kim, J. and Jong-Eun Roselyn Lee, “The Facebook Paths to Happiness: Effects of the Number of Facebook Friends and Self-Presentation on Subjective Well-Being,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 14, no. 6 (2011): 360.

Loughnan, S., et al., “Economic Inequality Is Linked to Biased Self-Perception,” Psychological Science 22, no. 10 (2011): 1254.

Morgan, W. and Steven R. Wilson, “Explaining Child Abuse as a Lack of Safe Ground,” in The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication , eds. Brian H. Spitzberg and William R. Cupach (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 341.

Patzer, G. L., Looks: Why They Matter More than You Ever Imagined (New York, NY: AMACOM, 2008), 147.

Sosik, J. J., Bruce J. Avolio, and Dong I. Jung, “Beneath the Mask: Examining the Relationship of Self-Presentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 217.

Stockton, M. B., et al., “Self-Perception and Body Image Associations with Body Mass Index among 8–10-Year-Old African American Girls,” Journal of Pediatric Psychology 34, no. 10 (2009): 1144.

Webber, L., and Melissa Korn, “Yahoo’s CEO among Many Notable Resume Flaps,” Wall Street Journal Blogs , May 7, 2012, accessed June 9, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/05/07/yahoos-ceo-among-many-notable-resume-flaps .

Wierzbicka, A., “The English Expressions Good Boy and Good Girl and Cultural Models of Child Rearing,” Culture and Psychology 10, no. 3 (2004): 251–78.

Communication in the Real World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Personal presentation is how you portray and present yourself to other people. It includes how you look, what you say, and what you do, and is all about marketing YOU, the brand that is you.

What others see and hear from you will influence their opinion of you. Good personal presentation is therefore about always showing yourself in the best possible light.

We all know that you only get one chance to make a first impression. Most of us are probably also aware that it takes quite a long time to undo that first impression—and that if it is negative, we may never get the chance to do so. This page explains some of the skills involved in making a good first impression—and then continuing to impress over time.

Understanding Personal Presentation

Personal presentation is about you and how you present yourself to others.

This includes both in everyday situations and when under pressure, for example, at job interviews. It is best thought of as a form of communication , because it always involves at least two people—the person presenting themselves (you) and the person seeing and hearing you.

Personal presentation covers what other people both see and hear. It includes how you look, what you say, and what you do. It therefore requires a wide range of skills, from improving your personal appearance to your communication skills.

However, all these aspects start from one place: you.

To present yourself well and confidently, you need to believe in yourself—or at least, be able to act as if you do.

Perception is Truth

People who present themselves as confident will be perceived as such by others.

There is also plenty of evidence that once we start acting as if we are confident, we generally feel more confident too.

Confidence—but not arrogance—is a very attractive trait. Having a justified belief in yourself and your abilities helps other people to be confident in you too.

Good personal presentation therefore requires good self-esteem and self-confidence. It means that you have to learn about yourself, and understand and accept who you are, both your positives and your negatives, and be comfortable with yourself. This does not, however, mean that you believe that there is nothing that you can improve—but that you are confident in your ability to achieve, and know how to overcome your flaws.

Paradoxically, therefore, personal presentation is actually not about being self-conscious or overly concerned with what others think about you. People who present themselves well generally do so because they believe in themselves, rather than because they are worried about what other people think. These concepts are closely related to Personal Empowerment .

A complete picture—and a cycle

Personal presentation is about conveying appropriate signals for the situation and for the other individuals involved.

People who lack self-esteem and confidence may fail to convey their message effectively or fully utilise their skills and abilities because of the way they present themselves. However, by improving your communication skills and reducing barriers to understanding, you may also improve your self-esteem and confidence.

Our pages: Communication Skills , Barriers to Communication and Improving Self-Esteem provide more information.

Areas of Personal Presentation

Improving personal presentation therefore requires a look at several different areas.

These include:

Self-esteem and self-confidence – how you feel about yourself and your abilities

Personal appearance – how you look, and how other people see you

Non-verbal communication – your body language, voice and facial expressions

Verbal communication – how you speak and use your words to make an impression

Behaviour – how you behave more generally, including politeness.

Self-Esteem and Self-Confidence

Self-esteem and self-confidence are closely related, but not quite the same thing.

Self-esteem is how you see and value yourself .

Self-confidence is believing in or having faith in your ability , rather than yourself as a person.

Neither self-esteem nor self-confidence are static. They vary as a result of numerous factors, including different situations and the presence of different people, personal stress levels and the level of change. Low levels of self-esteem are often associated with low levels of confidence, but those with good self-esteem can also suffer from low confidence.

To improve your self-esteem and self-confidence, spend time thinking about how you value yourself. Remind yourself of what is good about you, and learn to manage the highs and lows of self-esteem. In particular, try to avoid being affected too much by others’ opinions about you.

It is also worth practising coming across as confident even when you are not, because those who appear confident are not only perceived as confident, but often actually become more confident.

See our pages on Improving Self-Esteem and Building Confidence for more discussion, tips and advice on this area.

Personal Appearance and Non-Verbal Communication

Personal appearance is the way that you dress and take care of your general appearance.

Much as we may hate the idea that appearances matter, this is an important factor in personal presentation. Whether you like it or not, others will make judgements about you based on how you look, which includes how you dress and your accessories. It is therefore worth taking time to think about what messages you are sending to others in the way that you dress.

Case study: The ‘gravitas bag’

Louise was a young graduate, working in a government department. She had been working there about two years, and had just started working for a new boss, a woman just a few years older than her.

One day, on the way to an important meeting, Louise’s carrier bag, in which she was carrying her notebook and pens, broke on the bus. Her boss laughed, but said to her, carefully,

“ You know, you ought to think a bit about how what you wear and carry affects what people think about you. I’m not sure it gives quite the right impression to wander into a meeting with pens and books spilling out of a split carrier bag—that’s why I keep a briefcase in my cupboard for the days when I’ve worn a backpack into work. This may sound stupid, but I always feel that people may be judging me because I’m both female and quite young. I don’t want to give them any reason to doubt my professionalism. ”

Neither did Louise. The next weekend, she went shopping. On the Monday, she proudly showed her boss a new handbag and matching briefcase—her ‘gravitas bag’, as she described it.

Your personal appearance is closely related to the body language, gestures and other non-verbal messages that you use.

Many people are unaware of how they are affected by body language, and also how they are affecting others. By being aware of positive and negative non-verbal signals, you can improve your image and the way people perceive you.

There is more about these ideas in our pages on Personal Appearance and Non-Verbal Communication , including specific pages on Body Language and Face and Voice .

Verbal Communication and Effective Speaking

What you say and how you say it are both important aspects of how you are perceived by others.

Verbal communication is all about the words that you choose. Those who are good at verbal communication understand the impact of their particular choice of words and choose the right words for the situation and the audience. They are skilled at getting their message across to others and ensuring that it has been received.

See our pages on Verbal Communication for more.

Good communicators also use their voices effectively to convey their feelings, and to influence their audience. Your voice says a lot about you and learning how to use it more effectively has many benefits. There are a number of aspects to your voice, including accent, tone, pitch and volume. Some of these are easier to change than others, but it is worth thinking about how each of these affects your audience, so that you can learn to use your voice more effectively. 

See our pages Effective Speaking and Non-Verbal Communication: Face and Voice to learn more.

How you behave, and not just how you speak, will leave a strong impression on others.

For example, if you are habitually late, you may give other people the impression that you do not value their time. Good time management skills can therefore be helpful in giving the right impression—as well as enabling you to work more efficiently.

See our pages Time Management and Avoiding Distractions for some ideas of to improve your time management skills.

More crucially, your general politeness—to everyone, and not just people who ‘matter’—will create an important impression about how you value others.  This is an essential element of personal presentation. It pays to consider your manners.

See our page How to be Polite for more.

Further Reading from Skills You Need

Our Communication Skills eBooks

Learn more about the key communication skills you need to be a more effective communicator.

Our eBooks are ideal for anyone who wants to learn about or develop their interpersonal skills and are full of easy-to-follow, practical information.

And finally…

It is almost certainly impossible to overestimate the importance of personal presentation, especially in creating a good first impression, but also in giving a longer-term view of yourself.

Improving some fairly basic communication skills and increasing your self-awareness will improve your ability to present yourself well. Knowing that you are more likely to say and do the right things, and look the part, will help to increase your confidence. All these will, in turn, help to ensure that you give the right impression.

This is especially true in more formal situations, culminating in improved communication and therefore better understanding.

Continue to: Personal Appearance Self-Presentation in Presentations

See also: Effective Ways to Present Yourself Well Building a Personal Brand That Will Boost Your Career 8 Ways to Effectively Market Yourself as a Professional

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The Best Tips for Presenting & Introducing Yourself

Last Updated: August 22, 2024 References

This article was co-authored by Alexandra Janelli . Alexandra Janelli is a Certified Hypnotherapist, Anxiety & Stress Management Coach, and owner and founder of Modrn Sanctuary, a holistic health and wellness facility in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. With over 10 years of experience, Alexandra specializes in helping clients push through their roadblocks to achieve their goals using her hypnotherapeutic approach. Alexandra holds a BS from the University of Miami. She graduated from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute with an Advanced Training Graduate Diploma in Hypnotherapy and Handwriting Analysis. Alexandra is also a Certified Life Coach from the iPEC Coach Training Program. She has worked with Academy Award Nominee Actors, world-renowned photographers, singers, top-level executives, and professionals across many sectors of business. Alexandra has been featured on MTV, Elle Magazine, Oprah Magazine, Men's Fitness, Swell City Guide, Dossier Journal, The New Yorker, and Time Out Chicago. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 75,959 times.

How you present yourself to others makes an enormous difference in how you view yourself. With the right mindset, confidence, look and behavior you can improve your self-image and feel your best. Take a look at the tips in this article and change your life for the better.

Improving Your Look

• Simple dietary changes can lead to massive improvements in your overall health and look. Focus on eating more healthy foods, like lean proteins (salmon, chicken breast, soy beans), fresh fruits and vegetables (cranberries and avocados are loaded with nutrients), and healthy grains (brown rice).
• Avoid trans fats and foods high in sodium. Cutting fast food and soda out of your diet will help.
• Jogging is a fun and easy way to exercise and stay fit that doesn’t require equipment or a health club membership. Get a friend to tag along and keep each other motivated.

• People are more likely to trust, be friendly with, and invest in a person who wears nice clothes. Subconscious judgments occur in the minds of even the most non-judgmental people. [1] X Research source
• Iron your shirts and pants to avoid looking like you just rolled out of bed. It’s easy to do and doesn’t take very long, yet the results have a big impact on your presentation.
• Try to coordinate outfits that match, using clothes that fit and accessories that don’t clash.

• Maintaining eye contact when you talk to someone assures them that you’re invested in what they have to say and that you respect them. This reflects well on you.
• Practicing proper posture tells people that you’re alert, focused, and care about your health. Don’t slouch, instead, try to sit upright while aligning along the natural curve of your back. Set reminders throughout the day to keep you on track until its second nature. [3] X Research source

• Good personal hygiene will keep you looking and feeling better. It helps prevent disease and improves confidence and self-image. [4] X Research source
• Keep a clean house. When you have guests over, a tidy living room, organized kitchen, and made bed inform visitors that you are in control of your life.

Demonstrating Proper Behavior

• Offer small compliments to make people feel appreciated. Maybe they got a new hairstyle or made a strong contribution to a good effort. Saying “You look nice today” or “That was a great idea” can make somebody’s day and doing so improves their perception of you.
• Simply saying “please,” “thank you,” or “bless you” goes a long way when meeting new people.

• Be careful not to over-share or pry to hard with your questions. Keep topics light in the beginning by asking about fun parts of people’s lives like vacations and hobbies.

• When encountering new people, find a balance between shyness and assertiveness. Make an effort to introduce yourself to people but don’t force your way into conversations. Be aware of people’s body language.

• Besides the benefit of other people’s perception of you, working hard results in improved feelings towards yourself. People derive satisfaction and pride from a strong work ethic.
• Good ways to improve your work ethic include: Better punctuality, avoiding procrastination, helping with other people’s projects, focusing on small details, embracing responsibility, starting early, and never saying “that’s not my job.” [6] X Research source

Changing Your Attitude

• Many of the steps listed above in this article can help build confidence. Exercising, dressing well, and being a gracious and friendly conversationalist all lead to improved levels of confidence.

• When focused on your own flaws, it’s easy to forget other people aren’t perfect either. If you actively work to better yourself, people will notice and admire you for it.

Be Charismatic with this Expert Series

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Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about psychological resilience, check out our in-depth interview with Alexandra Janelli .

• ↑ https://riskology.co/dress-well/
• ↑ https://artofeloquence.com/articles/body-language/
• ↑ https://personalexcellence.co/blog/good-posture/
• ↑ https://www.hygieneexpert.co.uk/importancegoodpersonalhygiene.html
• ↑ https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-4005/10-Ways-to-Be-More-Gracious.html
• ↑ https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2014/02/how-to-build-a-strong-work-ethic/
• ↑ https://lifehacker.com/how-to-build-your-confidence-and-why-it-matters-1442414831

About This Article

If you want to successfully present yourself to others, improve your look by dressing in flattering clothes that make you feel confident and comfortable. You should also project positive body language by maintaining proper posture and eye contact during conversations, so people know you're interested in what they have to say. In addition, be gracious, polite, and kind to others as well as yourself to show that you are a caring, balanced person. For example, offer small compliments to make people feel appreciated, and try to say "please," "thank you," and "bless you" more, since little friendly gestures like these can go a long way with people you've just met. Furthermore, remember to demonstrate a strong work ethic by meeting deadlines and showing up on time, so others will see you as reliable. For more advice, including how to change your attitude and present yourself with confidence, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Self-Presentation Theory: Self-Construction and Audience Pleasing

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• Roy F. Baumeister &
• Debra G. Hutton  

Part of the book series: Springer Series in Social Psychology ((SSSOC))

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Self-presentation is behavior that attempts to convey some information about oneself or some image of oneself to other people. It denotes a class of motivations in human behavior. These motivations are in part stable dispositions of individuals but they depend on situational factors to elicit them. Specifically, self-presentational motivations are activated by the evaluative presence of other people and by others’ (even potential) knowledge of one’s behavior.

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Baumeister, R.F., Hutton, D.G. (1987). Self-Presentation Theory: Self-Construction and Audience Pleasing. In: Mullen, B., Goethals, G.R. (eds) Theories of Group Behavior. Springer Series in Social Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4634-3_4

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68 Self-Presentation, Attitudes, and Persuasion

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe social roles and how they influence behavior
• Explain what social norms are and how they influence behavior
• Define script
• Describe the findings of Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment
• Define attitude
• Describe how people’s attitudes are internally changed through cognitive dissonance
• Explain how people’s attitudes are externally changed through persuasion
• Describe the peripheral and central routes to persuasion

Self-presentation

As you’ve learned, social psychology is the study of how people affect one another’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We have discussed situational perspectives and social psychology’s emphasis on the ways in which a person’s environment, including culture and other social influences, affect behavior. In this section, we examine situational forces that have a strong influence on human behavior including social roles, social norms, and scripts. We discuss how humans use the social environment as a source of information, or cues, on how to behave. Situational influences on our behavior have important consequences, such as whether we will help a stranger in an emergency or how we would behave in an unfamiliar environment.

SOCIAL ROLES

One major social determinant of human behavior is our social roles. A  social role  is a pattern of behavior that is expected of a person in a given setting or group (Hare, 2003). Each one of us has several social roles. You may be, at the same time, a student, a parent, an aspiring teacher, a son or daughter, a spouse, and a lifeguard. How do these social roles influence your behavior? Social roles are defined by culturally shared knowledge. That is, nearly everyone in a given culture knows what behavior is expected of a person in a given role. For example, what is the social role for a student? If you look around a college classroom you will likely see students engaging in studious behavior, taking notes, listening to the professor, reading the textbook, and sitting quietly at their desks ( Figure ). Of course you may see students deviating from the expected studious behavior such as texting on their phones or using Facebook on their laptops, but in all cases, the students that you observe are attending class—a part of the social role of students.

Social roles, and our related behavior, can vary across different settings. How do you behave when you are engaging in the role of son or daughter and attending a family function? Now imagine how you behave when you are engaged in the role of employee at your workplace. It is very likely that your behavior will be different. Perhaps you are more relaxed and outgoing with your family, making jokes and doing silly things. But at your workplace you might speak more professionally, and although you may be friendly, you are also serious and focused on getting the work completed. These are examples of how our social roles influence and often dictate our behavior to the extent that identity and personality can vary with context (that is, in different social groups) (Malloy, Albright, Kenny, Agatstein & Winquist, 1997).

SOCIAL NORMS

As discussed previously, social roles are defined by a culture’s shared knowledge of what is expected behavior of an individual in a specific role. This shared knowledge comes from social norms. A  social norm  is a group’s expectation of what is appropriate and acceptable behavior for its members—how they are supposed to behave and think (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955; Berkowitz, 2004). How are we expected to act? What are we expected to talk about? What are we expected to wear? In our discussion of social roles we noted that colleges have social norms for students’ behavior in the role of student and workplaces have social norms for employees’ behaviors in the role of employee. Social norms are everywhere including in families, gangs, and on social media outlets. What are some social norms on Facebook?

My 11-year-old daughter, Jessica, recently told me she needed shorts and shirts for the summer, and that she wanted me to take her to a store at the mall that is popular with preteens and teens to buy them. I have noticed that many girls have clothes from that store, so I tried teasing her. I said, “All the shirts say ‘Aero’ on the front. If you are wearing a shirt like that and you have a substitute teacher, and the other girls are all wearing that type of shirt, won’t the substitute teacher think you are all named ‘Aero’?”

My daughter replied, in typical 11-year-old fashion, “Mom, you are not funny. Can we please go shopping?”

I tried a different tactic. I asked Jessica if having clothing from that particular store will make her popular. She replied, “No, it will not make me popular. It is what the popular kids wear. It will make me feel happier.” How can a label or name brand make someone feel happier? Think back to what you’ve learned about  lifespan development . What is it about pre-teens and young teens that make them want to fit in ( Figure )? Does this change over time? Think back to your high school experience, or look around your college campus. What is the main name brand clothing you see? What messages do we get from the media about how to fit in?

Because of social roles, people tend to know what behavior is expected of them in specific, familiar settings. A  script  is a person’s knowledge about the sequence of events expected in a specific setting (Schank & Abelson, 1977). How do you act on the first day of school, when you walk into an elevator, or are at a restaurant? For example, at a restaurant in the United States, if we want the server’s attention, we try to make eye contact. In Brazil, you would make the sound “psst” to get the server’s attention. You can see the cultural differences in scripts. To an American, saying “psst” to a server might seem rude, yet to a Brazilian, trying to make eye contact might not seem an effective strategy. Scripts are important sources of information to guide behavior in given situations. Can you imagine being in an unfamiliar situation and not having a script for how to behave? This could be uncomfortable and confusing. How could you find out about social norms in an unfamiliar culture?

ZIMBARDO’S STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

The famous  Stanford prison experiment , conducted by social psychologist Philip  Zimbardo  and his colleagues at Stanford University, demonstrated the power of social roles, social norms, and scripts. In the summer of 1971, an advertisement was placed in a California newspaper asking for male volunteers to participate in a study about the psychological effects of prison life. More than 70 men volunteered, and these volunteers then underwent psychological testing to eliminate candidates who had underlying psychiatric issues, medical issues, or a history of crime or drug abuse. The pool of volunteers was whittled down to 24 healthy male college students. Each student was paid $15 per day and was randomly assigned to play the role of either a prisoner or a guard in the study. Based on what you have learned about research methods, why is it important that participants were randomly assigned?

A mock prison was constructed in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. Participants assigned to play the role of prisoners were “arrested” at their homes by Palo Alto police officers, booked at a police station, and subsequently taken to the mock prison. The experiment was scheduled to run for several weeks. To the surprise of the researchers, both the “prisoners” and “guards” assumed their roles with zeal. In fact, on day 2, some of the prisoners revolted, and the guards quelled the rebellion by threatening the prisoners with night sticks. In a relatively short time, the guards came to harass the prisoners in an increasingly sadistic manner, through a complete lack of privacy, lack of basic comforts such as mattresses to sleep on, and through degrading chores and late-night counts.

The prisoners, in turn, began to show signs of severe anxiety and hopelessness—they began tolerating the guards’ abuse. Even the Stanford professor who designed the study and was the head researcher, Philip Zimbardo, found himself acting as if the prison was real and his role, as prison supervisor, was real as well. After only six days, the experiment had to be ended due to the participants’ deteriorating behavior. Zimbardo explained,

At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation—a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the “good” guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress. Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work. (Zimbardo, 2013)

The Stanford prison experiment demonstrated the power of social roles, norms, and scripts in affecting human behavior. The guards and prisoners enacted their social roles by engaging in behaviors appropriate to the roles: The guards gave orders and the prisoners followed orders. Social norms require guards to be authoritarian and prisoners to be submissive. When prisoners rebelled, they violated these social norms, which led to upheaval. The specific acts engaged by the guards and the prisoners derived from scripts. For example, guards degraded the prisoners by forcing them do push-ups and by removing all privacy. Prisoners rebelled by throwing pillows and trashing their cells. Some prisoners became so immersed in their roles that they exhibited symptoms of mental breakdown; however, according to Zimbardo, none of the participants suffered long term harm (Alexander, 2001).

The Stanford Prison Experiment has some parallels with the abuse of prisoners of war by U.S. Army troops and CIA personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004. The offenses at Abu  Ghraib  were documented by photographs of the abuse, some taken by the abusers themselves ( Figure ).

Visit this  website  to hear an NPR interview with Philip  Zimbardo  where he discusses the parallels between the Stanford prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Human behavior is largely influenced by our social roles, norms, and scripts. In order to know how to act in a given situation, we have shared cultural knowledge of how to behave depending on our role in society. Social norms dictate the behavior that is appropriate or inappropriate for each role. Each social role has scripts that help humans learn the sequence of appropriate behaviors in a given setting. The famous Stanford prison experiment is an example of how the power of the situation can dictate the social roles, norms, and scripts we follow in a given situation, even if this behavior is contrary to our typical behavior.

Review Questions

A(n) ________ is a set of group expectations for appropriate thoughts and behaviors of its members.

• social role
• social norm
• attribution

On his first day of soccer practice, Jose suits up in a t-shirt, shorts, and cleats and runs out to the field to join his teammates. Jose’s behavior is reflective of ________.

• social influence
• good athletic behavior
• normative behavior

When it comes to buying clothes, teenagers often follow social norms; this is likely motivated by ________.

• following parents’ rules
• saving money
• looking good

In the Stanford prison experiment, even the lead researcher succumbed to his role as a prison supervisor. This is an example of the power of ________ influencing behavior.

• social norms
• social roles

Critical Thinking Questions

Why didn’t the “good” guards in the Stanford prison experiment object to other guards’ abusive behavior? Were the student prisoners simply weak people? Why didn’t they object to being abused?

Describe how social roles, social norms, and scripts were evident in the Stanford prison experiment. How can this experiment be applied to everyday life? Are there any more recent examples where people started fulfilling a role and became abusive?

Personal Application Questions

Try attending a religious service very different from your own and see how you feel and behave without knowing the appropriate script. Or, try attending an important, personal event that you have never attended before, such as a bar mitzvah (a coming-of-age ritual in Jewish culture), a quinceañera (in some Latin American cultures a party is given to a girl who is turning 15 years old), a wedding, a funeral, or a sporting event new to you, such as horse racing or bull riding. Observe and record your feelings and behaviors in this unfamiliar setting for which you lack the appropriate script. Do you silently observe the action, or do you ask another person for help interpreting the behaviors of people at the event? Describe in what ways your behavior would change if you were to attend a similar event in the future?

Name and describe at least three social roles you have adopted for yourself. Why did you adopt these roles? What are some roles that are expected of you, but that you try to resist?

Attitudes and Persuasion

Social psychologists have documented how the power of the situation can influence our behaviors. Now we turn to how the power of the situation can influence our attitudes and beliefs.  Attitude  is our evaluation of a person, an idea, or an object. We have attitudes for many things ranging from products that we might pick up in the supermarket to people around the world to political policies. Typically, attitudes are favorable or unfavorable: positive or negative (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). And, they have three components: an affective component (feelings), a behavioral component (the effect of the attitude on behavior), and a cognitive component (belief and knowledge) (Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960).

For example, you may hold a positive attitude toward recycling. This attitude should result in positive feelings toward recycling (such as “It makes me feel good to recycle” or “I enjoy knowing that I make a small difference in reducing the amount of waste that ends up in landfills”). Certainly, this attitude should be reflected in our behavior: You actually recycle as often as you can. Finally, this attitude will be reflected in favorable thoughts (for example, “Recycling is good for the environment” or “Recycling is the responsible thing to do”).

Our attitudes and beliefs are not only influenced by external forces, but also by internal influences that we control. Like our behavior, our attitudes and thoughts are not always changed by situational pressures, but they can be consciously changed by our own free will. In this section we discuss the conditions under which we would want to change our own attitudes and beliefs.

WHAT IS COGNITIVE DISSONANCE?

Social psychologists have documented that feeling good about ourselves and maintaining positive self-esteem is a powerful motivator of human behavior (Tavris & Aronson, 2008). In the United States, members of the predominant culture typically think very highly of themselves and view themselves as good people who are above average on many desirable traits (Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005). Often, our behavior, attitudes, and beliefs are affected when we experience a threat to our self-esteem or positive self-image. Psychologist Leon Festinger (1957) defined  cognitive dissonance  as psychological discomfort arising from holding two or more inconsistent attitudes, behaviors, or cognitions (thoughts, beliefs, or opinions). Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance states that when we experience a conflict in our behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs that runs counter to our positive self-perceptions, we experience psychological discomfort (dissonance). For example, if you believe smoking is bad for your health but you continue to smoke, you experience conflict between your belief and behavior ( Figure ).

Later research documented that only conflicting cognitions that threaten individuals’ positive self-image cause dissonance (Greenwald & Ronis, 1978). Additional research found that dissonance is not only psychologically uncomfortable but also can cause physiological arousal (Croyle & Cooper, 1983) and activate regions of the brain important in emotions and cognitive functioning (van Veen, Krug, Schooler, & Carter, 2009). When we experience cognitive dissonance, we are motivated to decrease it because it is psychologically, physically, and mentally uncomfortable. We can reduce  cognitive dissonance  by bringing our cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors in line—that is, making them harmonious. This can be done in different ways, such as:

• changing our discrepant behavior (e.g., stop smoking),
• changing our cognitions through rationalization or denial (e.g., telling ourselves that health risks can be reduced by smoking filtered cigarettes),
• adding a new cognition (e.g., “Smoking suppresses my appetite so I don’t become overweight, which is good for my health.”).

A classic example of cognitive dissonance is John, a 20-year-old who enlists in the military. During boot camp he is awakened at 5:00 a.m., is chronically sleep deprived, yelled at, covered in sand flea bites, physically bruised and battered, and mentally exhausted ( Figure ). It gets worse. Recruits that make it to week 11 of boot camp have to do 54 hours of continuous training.

Not surprisingly, John is miserable. No one likes to be miserable. In this type of situation, people can change their beliefs, their attitudes, or their behaviors. The last option, a change of behaviors, is not available to John. He has signed on to the military for four years, and he cannot legally leave.

If John keeps thinking about how miserable he is, it is going to be a very long four years. He will be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. As an alternative to this misery, John can change his beliefs or attitudes. He can tell himself, “I am becoming stronger, healthier, and sharper. I am learning discipline and how to defend myself and my country. What I am doing is really important.” If this is his belief, he will realize that he is becoming stronger through his challenges. He then will feel better and not experience cognitive dissonance, which is an uncomfortable state.

The Effect of Initiation

The military example demonstrates the observation that a difficult  initiation  into a group influences us to like the group  more , due to the justification of effort. We do not want to have wasted time and effort to join a group that we eventually leave. A classic experiment by Aronson and Mills (1959) demonstrated this justification of effort effect. College students volunteered to join a campus group that would meet regularly to discuss the psychology of sex. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: no initiation, an easy initiation, and a difficult initiation into the group. After participating in the first discussion, which was deliberately made very boring, participants rated how much they liked the group. Participants who underwent a difficult initiation process to join the group rated the group more favorably than did participants with an easy initiation or no initiation ( Figure ).

Similar effects can be seen in a more recent study of how student effort affects course evaluations. Heckert, Latier, Ringwald-Burton, and Drazen (2006) surveyed 463 undergraduates enrolled in courses at a midwestern university about the amount of effort that their courses required of them. In addition, the students were also asked to evaluate various aspects of the course. Given what you’ve just read, it will come as no surprise that those courses that were associated with the highest level of effort were evaluated as being more valuable than those that did not. Furthermore, students indicated that they learned more in courses that required more effort, regardless of the grades that they received in those courses (Heckert et al., 2006).

Besides the classic military example and group initiation, can you think of other examples of  cognitive dissonance ? Here is one: Marco and Maria live in Fairfield County, Connecticut, which is one of the wealthiest areas in the United States and has a very high cost of living. Marco telecommutes from home and Maria does not work outside of the home. They rent a very small house for more than $3000 a month. Maria shops at consignment stores for clothes and economizes where she can. They complain that they never have any money and that they cannot buy anything new. When asked why they do not move to a less expensive location, since Marco telecommutes, they respond that Fairfield County is beautiful, they love the beaches, and they feel comfortable there. How does the theory of cognitive dissonance apply to Marco and Maria’s choices?

In the previous section we discussed that the motivation to reduce cognitive dissonance leads us to change our attitudes, behaviors, and/or cognitions to make them consonant.  Persuasion  is the process of changing our attitude toward something based on some kind of communication. Much of the persuasion we experience comes from outside forces. How do people convince others to change their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors ( Figure )? What communications do you receive that attempt to persuade you to change your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors?

A subfield of social psychology studies persuasion and social influence, providing us with a plethora of information on how humans can be persuaded by others.

Yale Attitude Change Approach

The topic of persuasion has been one of the most extensively researched areas in social psychology (Fiske et al., 2010). During the Second World War, Carl  Hovland  extensively researched persuasion for the U.S. Army. After the war, Hovland continued his exploration of persuasion at Yale University. Out of this work came a model called the  Yale attitude change approach , which describes the conditions under which people tend to change their attitudes. Hovland demonstrated that certain features of the source of a persuasive message, the content of the message, and the characteristics of the audience will influence the persuasiveness of a message (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953).

Features of the source of the persuasive message include the credibility of the speaker (Hovland & Weiss, 1951) and the physical attractiveness of the speaker (Eagly & Chaiken, 1975; Petty, Wegener, & Fabrigar, 1997). Thus, speakers who are credible, or have expertise on the topic, and who are deemed as trustworthy are more persuasive than less credible speakers. Similarly, more attractive speakers are more persuasive than less attractive speakers. The use of famous actors and athletes to advertise products on television and in print relies on this principle. The immediate and long term impact of the persuasion also depends, however, on the credibility of the messenger (Kumkale & Albarracín, 2004).

Features of the message itself that affect persuasion include subtlety (the quality of being important, but not obvious) (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; Walster & Festinger, 1962); sidedness (that is, having more than one side) (Crowley & Hoyer, 1994; Igou & Bless, 2003; Lumsdaine & Janis, 1953); timing (Haugtvedt & Wegener, 1994; Miller & Campbell, 1959), and whether both sides are presented. Messages that are more subtle are more persuasive than direct messages. Arguments that occur first, such as in a debate, are more influential if messages are given back-to-back. However, if there is a delay after the first message, and before the audience needs to make a decision, the last message presented will tend to be more persuasive (Miller & Campbell, 1959).

Features of the audience that affect persuasion are attention (Albarracín & Wyer, 2001; Festinger & Maccoby, 1964), intelligence, self-esteem (Rhodes & Wood, 1992), and age (Krosnick & Alwin, 1989). In order to be persuaded, audience members must be paying attention. People with lower intelligence are more easily persuaded than people with higher intelligence; whereas people with moderate self-esteem are more easily persuaded than people with higher or lower self-esteem (Rhodes & Wood, 1992). Finally, younger adults aged 18–25 are more persuadable than older adults.

Elaboration Likelihood Model

An especially popular model that describes the dynamics of persuasion is the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). The  elaboration likelihood model  considers the variables of the attitude change approach—that is, features of the source of the persuasive message, contents of the message, and characteristics of the audience are used to determine when attitude change will occur. According to the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, there are two main routes that play a role in delivering a persuasive message: central and peripheral ( Figure ).

The  central route  is logic driven and uses data and facts to convince people of an argument’s worthiness. For example, a car company seeking to persuade you to purchase their model will emphasize the car’s safety features and fuel economy. This is a direct route to persuasion that focuses on the quality of the information. In order for the central route of persuasion to be effective in changing attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors, the argument must be strong and, if successful, will result in lasting attitude change.

The central route to persuasion works best when the target of persuasion, or the audience, is analytical and willing to engage in processing of the information. From an advertiser’s perspective, what products would be best sold using the central route to persuasion? What audience would most likely be influenced to buy the product? One example is buying a computer. It is likely, for example, that small business owners might be especially influenced by the focus on the computer’s quality and features such as processing speed and memory capacity.

The  peripheral route  is an indirect route that uses peripheral cues to associate positivity with the message (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Instead of focusing on the facts and a product’s quality, the peripheral route relies on association with positive characteristics such as positive emotions and celebrity endorsement. For example, having a popular athlete advertise athletic shoes is a common method used to encourage young adults to purchase the shoes. This route to attitude change does not require much effort or information processing. This method of persuasion may promote positivity toward the message or product, but it typically results in less permanent attitude or behavior change. The audience does not need to be analytical or motivated to process the message. In fact, a peripheral route to persuasion may not even be noticed by the audience, for example in the strategy of product placement. Product placement refers to putting a product with a clear brand name or brand identity in a TV show or movie to promote the product (Gupta & Lord, 1998). For example, one season of the reality series  American Idol prominently showed the panel of judges drinking out of cups that displayed the Coca-Cola logo. What other products would be best sold using the peripheral route to persuasion? Another example is clothing: A retailer may focus on celebrities that are wearing the same style of clothing.

Foot-in-the-door Technique

Researchers have tested many persuasion strategies that are effective in selling products and changing people’s attitude, ideas, and behaviors. One effective strategy is the foot-in-the-door technique (Cialdini, 2001; Pliner, Hart, Kohl, & Saari, 1974). Using the  foot-in-the-door technique , the persuader gets a person to agree to bestow a small favor or to buy a small item, only to later request a larger favor or purchase of a bigger item. The foot-in-the-door technique was demonstrated in a study by Freedman and Fraser (1966) in which participants who agreed to post small sign in their yard or sign a petition were more likely to agree to put a large sign in their yard than people who declined the first request ( Figure ). Research on this technique also illustrates the principle of consistency (Cialdini, 2001): Our past behavior often directs our future behavior, and we have a desire to maintain consistency once we have a committed to a behavior.

A common application of foot-in-the-door is when teens ask their parents for a small permission (for example, extending curfew by a half hour) and then asking them for something larger. Having granted the smaller request increases the likelihood that parents will acquiesce with the later, larger request.

How would a store owner use the foot-in-the-door technique to sell you an expensive product? For example, say that you are buying the latest model smartphone, and the salesperson suggests you purchase the best data plan. You agree to this. The salesperson then suggests a bigger purchase—the three-year extended warranty. After agreeing to the smaller request, you are more likely to also agree to the larger request. You may have encountered this if you have bought a car. When salespeople realize that a buyer intends to purchase a certain model, they might try to get the customer to pay for many or most available options on the car.

Attitudes are our evaluations or feelings toward a person, idea, or object and typically are positive or negative. Our attitudes and beliefs are influenced not only by external forces, but also by internal influences that we control. An internal form of attitude change is cognitive dissonance or the tension we experience when our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are in conflict. In order to reduce dissonance, individuals can change their behavior, attitudes, or cognitions, or add a new cognition. External forces of persuasion include advertising; the features of advertising that influence our behaviors include the source, message, and audience. There are two primary routes to persuasion. The central route to persuasion uses facts and information to persuade potential consumers. The peripheral route uses positive association with cues such as beauty, fame, and positive emotions.

Attitudes describe our ________ of people, objects, and ideas.

• evaluations

Cognitive dissonance causes discomfort because it disrupts our sense of ________.

• unpredictability
• consistency

In order for the central route to persuasion to be effective, the audience must be ________ and ________.

• analytical; motivated
• attentive; happy
• intelligent; unemotional
• gullible; distracted

Examples of cues used in peripheral route persuasion include all of the following  except

• celebrity endorsement
• positive emotions
• attractive models
• factual information

Give an example (one  not  used in class or your text) of cognitive dissonance and how an individual might resolve this.

Imagine that you work for an advertising agency, and you’ve been tasked with developing an advertising campaign to increase sales of Bliss Soda. How would you develop an advertisement for this product that uses a central route of persuasion? How would you develop an ad using a peripheral route of persuasion?

Cognitive dissonance often arises after making an important decision, called post-decision dissonance (or in popular terms, buyer’s remorse). Describe a recent decision you made that caused dissonance and describe how you resolved it.

Describe a time when you or someone you know used the foot-in-the-door technique to gain someone’s compliance.

[glossary-page] [glossary-term]attitude:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]evaluations of or feelings toward a person, idea, or object that are typically positive or negative[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]central route persuasion:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]logic-driven arguments using data and facts to convince people of an argument’s worthiness[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]cognitive dissonance:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]psychological discomfort that arises from a conflict in a person’s behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs that runs counter to one’s positive self-perception[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]foot-in-the-door technique:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]persuasion of one person by another person, encouraging a person to agree to a small favor, or to buy a small item, only to later request a larger favor or purchase of a larger item[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]peripheral route persuasion:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]one person persuades another person; an indirect route that relies on association of peripheral cues (such as positive emotions and celebrity endorsement) to associate positivity with a message[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]persuasion:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]process of changing our attitude toward something based on some form of communication[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]script:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]person’s knowledge about the sequence of events in a specific setting[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]social norm:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]group’s expectations regarding what is appropriate and acceptable for the thoughts and behavior of its members[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]social role:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]socially defined pattern of behavior that is expected of a person in a given setting or group[/glossary-definition]

[glossary-term]stanford prison experiment:[/glossary-term] [glossary-definition]Stanford University conducted an experiment in a mock prison that demonstrated the power of social roles, social norms, and scripts[/glossary-definition] [/glossary-page]

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Self Presentation And Self Presentation Theory Explained

What is self presentation.

Self presentation is something that everyone needs to learn, but not many do. If you watch television, movies, read magazines, or even visit social networking websites, you’ll see lots of people talking about who they are. However, very few actually talk about how they feel and why they think the way that they do.

One thing most people struggle with when it comes to self presentation is confidence. People often don’t know what to say or what to ask. They worry about what other people might think of them or what others will think if they start to open up to them. So, instead of taking the plunge and starting to share things about yourself, you just stay quiet. This makes no sense because you never get anywhere in life by keeping silent.

But here’s a little secret – sharing who we are can help us grow personally, professionally and financially.

Self-presentation Definition

When you’re trying to get ahead in life, you need to be able to present yourself in the best possible way. If you don’t know how to do this, you might end up looking like an amateur.

Here is a definition of self presentation.

A person’s self presentation is the way that he or she presents himself to other people. This includes things such as his or her clothing, hairstyle, and makeup.

What Is Self Presentation Theory?

Self-presentation theory is a psychological theory that explains how people present themselves to others. Self-presentation can take many forms, including verbal, nonverbal, and behavioral.

It has two parts: the self-concept and the self-schema. The self-concept is how we see ourselves concerning others; the self-schema is how we see ourselves concerning our thoughts and feelings.

The impact of self-presentation theory on organizations has been significant because it helps us understand why people make some choices over others when they are trying to sell something or position themselves for a job interview or promotion.

The theory was originally developed by anthropologist Sherry Turkle in 1977. In her book Life On The Screen, she wrote about how people use technology to try to create an idealized version of themselves for others, and then try to make their idealized selves real through interactions with other people.

This idea has become more popular in recent years as we have become increasingly connected through technology like social media and smartphones. We see examples all around us: people posting selfies on Instagram with their friends or families who aren’t there; people tweeting updates about their lives while they’re at work, and other examples too numerous to name here.

Drew is the creator of myselfintroduction.com, designed to teach everyone how to introduce themselves to anyone with confidence in any situation.

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Self-Presentation: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Audiences We Have

It is interesting to note that each of the social influences on our sense of self that we have discussed can be harnessed as a way of protecting our self-esteem. The final influence we will explore can also be used strategically to elevate not only our own esteem, but the esteem we have in the eyes of others. Positive self-esteem occurs not only when we do well in our own eyes but also when we feel that we are positively perceived by the other people we care about.

Because it is so important to be seen as competent and productive members of society, people naturally attempt to present themselves to others in a positive light. We attempt to convince others that we are good and worthy people by appearing attractive, strong, intelligent, and likable and by saying positive things to others (Jones & Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 2003). The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status , is known as self-presentation , and it is a basic and natural part of everyday life.

A big question in relation to self-presentation is the extent to which it is an honest versus more strategic, potentially dishonest enterprise. The sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) developed an influential theory of self-presentation and described it as a mainly honest process, where people need to present the parts of themselves required by the social role that they are playing in a given situation. If everyone plays their part according to accepted social scripts and conventions, then the social situation will run smoothly and the participants will avoid embarrassment. Seen in this way, self-presentation is a transparent process, where we are trying to play the part required of us, and we trust that others are doing the same. Other theorists, though, have viewed self-presentation as a more strategic endeavor, which may involve not always portraying ourselves in genuine ways (e.g., Jones & Pittman, 1982). As is often the case with two seemingly opposing perspectives, it is quite likely that both are true in certain situations, depending on the social goals of the actors.

Different self-presentation strategies may be used to create different emotions in other people, and the use of these strategies may be evolutionarily selected because they are successful (Toma, Hancock, & Ellison, 2008). Edward Jones and Thane Pittman (1982) described five self-presentation strategies, each of which is expected to create a resulting emotion in the other person:

• The goal of ingratiation is to create liking by using flattery or charm.
• The goal of intimidation is to create fear by showing that you can be aggressive.
• The goal of exemplification is to create guilt by showing that you are a better person than the other.
• The goal of supplication is to create pity by indicating to others that you are helpless and needy.
• The goal of self-promotion is to create respect by persuading others that you are competent.

No matter who is using it, self-presentation can easily be overdone, and when it is, it backfires. People who overuse the ingratiation technique and who are seen as obviously and strategically trying to get others to like them are often disliked because of this. Have you ever had a slick salesperson obviously try to ingratiate him- or herself with you just so you will buy a particular product, and you end up not liking the person and making a hasty retreat from the premises? People who overuse the exemplification or self-promotion strategies by boasting or bragging, particularly if that boasting does not appear to reflect their true characteristics, may end up being perceived as arrogant and even self-deluded (Wosinska, Dabul, Whetstone-Dion, & Cialdini, 1996). Using intimidation can also often backfire; acting more modestly may be more effective. Again, the point is clear: we may want to self-promote with the goal of getting others to like us, but we must also be careful to consider the point of view of the other person. Being aware of these strategies is not only useful for better understanding how to use them responsibly ourselves, it can also help us to understand that other people’s behaviors may often reflect their self-presentational concerns. This can, in turn, facilitate better empathy for others, particularly when they are exhibiting challenging behaviors (Friedlander & Schwartz, 1985). For instance, perhaps someone’s verbally aggressive behavior toward you is more about that person being afraid rather than about his or her desire to do you harm.

Now that we have explored some of the commonly used self-presentation tactics, let’s look at how they manifest in specific social behaviors. One concrete way to self-promote is to display our positive physical characteristics. A reason that many of us spend money on improving our physical appearance is the desire to look good to others so that they will like us. We can also earn status by collecting expensive possessions such as fancy cars and big houses and by trying to associate with high-status others. Additionally, we may attempt to dominate or intimidate others in social interactions. People who talk more and louder and those who initiate more social interactions are afforded higher status. A businessman who greets others with a strong handshake and a smile, and people who speak out strongly for their opinions in group discussions may be attempting to do so as well. In some cases, people may even resort to aggressive behavior, such as bullying, in attempts to improve their status (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996).

Self-promotion can also be pursued in our online social behaviors. For example, a study in Taiwan conducted by Wang and Stefanone (2013) used survey methodology to investigate the relationship between personality traits, self-presentation and the use of check-ins on Facebook. Interestingly, narcissism was found to predict scores on a measure of exhibitionistic, self-promoting use of Facebook check-ins, which included items like “I check in so people know that I am with friends,” and “I expect friends to like or leave comments on my check-in status on Facebook.”

Other studies have also found associations between narcissistic traits and self-promotional activity on Facebook. Mehdizadeh (2010), for example, found that narcissistic personality scores were positively correlated with the amount of daily logins on Facebook and the duration of each login. Furthermore, narcissistic traits were related to increased use of self-promotional material in the main photo, view photos, status updates, and notes sections of people’s Facebook pages.

Analysis of the content and language used in Facebook postings has also revealed that they are sometimes used by individuals to self-promote. Bazarova, Taft, Choi, and Cosley (2013) explored self-presentation through language styles used in status updates, wall posts, and private messages from 79 participants. The use of positive emotion words was correlated with self-reported self-presentation concern in status updates. This is consistent with the idea that people share positive experiences with Facebook friends partly as a self-enhancement strategy.

Online self-presentation doesn’t seem to be limited to Facebook usage. There is also evidence that self-promotional concerns are often a part of blogging behaviors, too. Mazur and Kozarian (2010), for example, analyzed the content of adolescents’ blog entries and concluded that a careful concern for self-presentation was more central to their blogging behavior than direct interaction with others. This often seems to apply to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. Marwick and Boyd (2011) found that self-presentational strategies were a consistent part of celebrity tweeting, often deployed by celebrities to maintain their popularity and image.

You might not be surprised to hear that men and women use different approaches to self-presentation. Men are more likely to present themselves in an assertive way, by speaking and interrupting others, by visually focusing on the other person when they are speaking, and by leaning their bodies into the conversation. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be modest; they tend to create status by laughing and smiling, and by reacting more positively to the statements of others (Dovidio, Brown, Heltman, Ellyson, & Keation, 1988).

These gender differences are probably in large part socially determined as a result of the different reinforcements that men and women receive for using particular self-presentational strategies. For example, self-promoting by speaking out and acting assertively can be more effective for men than it is for women, in part because cross-culturally consistent stereotypes tend to depict assertiveness as more desirable in men than in women. These stereotypes can have very important consequences in the real world. For instance, one of the reasons for the “glass ceiling” existing in some occupations (where women experience discrimination in reaching top positions in organizations) may be attributable to the more negative reactions that their assertive behaviors, necessary for career advancement, receive than those of their male colleagues (Eagly & Carli, 2007).

There are also some cultural differences in the extent to which people use self-presentation strategies in social contexts. For instance, when considering job interviews, Konig, Haftseinsson, Jansen, & Stadelmann (2011) found that individuals from Iceland and Switzerland used less self-presentational behavior than people from the United States. Differences in self-presentation have also been found in job interviews involving individuals from Ghana, Turkey, Norway, and Germany, with the former two groups showing higher impression management scores than the latter two (Bye et al., 2011).

So far we have been talking about self-presentation as it operates in particular situations in the short-term. However, we also engage in longer-term self-presentational projects, where we seek to build particular reputations with particular audiences. Emler & Reicher (1995) describe the unique capacity humans have to know one another by repute and argue that, accordingly, we are often engaged in a process of reputation management , which is a form of long-term self-presentation, where individuals seek to build and sustain specific reputations with important audiences . According to this perspective, our behaviors in current social situations may not only be to serve our self-presentational goals in that moment, but also be based on a consideration of their longer-term repercussions for our reputations. As many politicians, for example, know only too well, a poor decision from their past can come back to haunt them when their reputation is being assessed during a campaign.

The concept of reputation management can be used to help explain a wide variety of social and antisocial behaviors, including corporate branding (Smith, Smith, & Wang, 2010), sociomoral debate (Emler, Tarry, & St. James, 2007), and teenage criminal activity (Lopez-Romero & Romero, 2011). In the last example, it is argued that a lot of teenage antisocial behavior results from a desire to build a reputation for toughness and rebelliousness with like-minded peer audiences (Emler & Reicher, 1995). Similarly, antisocial and self-destructive online actions, like people posting to Facebook their involvement in illegal acts during riots, or individuals engaging in life-threatening activities in Internet crazes like Neknominate, may make more sense if they are considered partly as stemming from a desire to project a particular reputation to specific audiences. Perhaps the perceived social kudos from doing these things outweighs the obvious personal risks in the individuals’ minds at the time.

People often project distinct reputations to different social audiences. For example, adolescents who engage in antisocial activity to build reputations for rebelliousness among their peers will often seek to construct very different reputations when their parents are the audience (Emler & Reicher, 1995). The desire to compartmentalize our reputations and audiences can even spill over into our online behaviors. Wiederhold (2012) found that, with some adolescents’ Facebook friends numbering in the hundreds or thousands, increasing numbers are moving to Twitter in order to reach a more selective audience. One critical trigger for this has been that their parents are now often friends with them on Facebook, creating a need for young people to find a new space where they can build reputations that may not always be parent-friendly (Wiederhold, 2012).

Although the desire to present the self favorably is a natural part of everyday life, both person and situation factors influence the extent to which we do it. For one, we are more likely to self-present in some situations than in others. When we are applying for a job or meeting with others whom we need to impress, we naturally become more attuned to the social aspects of the self, and our self-presentation increases.

There are also individual differences. Some people are naturally better at self-presentation—they enjoy doing it and are good at it—whereas others find self-presentation less desirable or more difficult. An important individual-difference variable known as self-monitoring has been shown in many studies to have a major impact on self-presentation. Self-monitoring refers to the tendency to be both motivated and capable of regulating our behavior to meet the demands of social situations (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000). High self-monitors are particularly good at reading the emotions of others and therefore are better at fitting into social situations—they agree with statements such as “In different situations and with different people, I often act like very different persons,” and “I guess I put on a show to impress or entertain people.” Low self-monitors, on the other hand, generally act on their own attitudes, even when the social situation suggests that they should behave otherwise. Low self-monitors are more likely to agree with statements such as “At parties and social gatherings, I do not attempt to do or say things that others will like,” and “I can only argue for ideas that I already believe.” In short, high self-monitors use self-presentation to try to get other people to like them by behaving in ways that the others find desirable, whereas low self-monitors tend to follow their internal convictions more than the demands of the social situation.

In one experiment that showed the importance of self-monitoring, Cheng and Chartrand (2003) had college students interact individually with another student (actually an experimental confederate) whom they thought they would be working with on an upcoming task. While they were interacting, the confederate subtly touched her own face several times, and the researchers recorded the extent to which the student participant mimicked the confederate by also touching his or her own face.

The situational variable was the status of the confederate. Before the meeting began, and according to random assignment to conditions, the students were told either that they would be the leader and that the other person would be the worker on the upcoming task, or vice versa. The person variable was self-monitoring, and each participant was classified as either high or low on self-monitoring on the basis of his or her responses to the self-monitoring scale.

As you can see in Figure 3.12 , Cheng and Chartrand found an interaction effect: the students who had been classified as high self-monitors were more likely to mimic the behavior of the confederate when she was described as being the leader than when she was described as being the worker, indicating that they were “tuned in” to the social situation and modified their behavior to appear more positively. Although the low self-monitors did mimic the other person, they did not mimic her more when the other was high, versus low, status. This finding is consistent with the idea that the high self-monitors were particularly aware of the other person’s status and attempted to self-present more positively to the high-status leader. The low self-monitors, on the other hand—because they feel less need to impress overall—did not pay much attention to the other person’s status.

High self-monitors imitated more when the person they were interacting with was of higher (versus lower) status. Low self-monitors were not sensitive to the status of the other. Data are from Cheng and Chartrand (2003).

This differential sensitivity to social dynamics between high and low self-monitors suggests that their self-esteem will be affected by different factors. For people who are high in self-monitoring, their self-esteem may be positively impacted when they perceive that their behavior matches the social demands of the situation, and negatively affected when they feel that it does not. In contrast, low self-monitors may experience self-esteem boosts when they see themselves behaving consistently with their internal standards, and feel less self-worth when they feel they are not living up to them (Ickes, Holloway, Stinson, & Hoodenpyle, 2006).

Key Takeaways

• Our self-concepts are affected by others’ appraisals, as demonstrated by concepts including the looking-glass self and self-labeling.
• The self-concept and self-esteem are also often strongly influenced by social comparison. For example, we use social comparison to determine the accuracy and appropriateness of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
• When we are able to compare ourselves favorably with others through downward social comparison, we feel good about ourselves. Upward social comparison with others who are better off than we are leads to negative emotions.
• Social identity refers to the positive emotions that we experience as a member of an important social group.
• Normally, our group memberships result in positive feelings, which occur because we perceive our own groups, and thus ourselves, in a positive light.
• Which of our many category identities is most accessible for us will vary from day to day as a function of the particular situation we are in.
• In the face of others’ behaviors, we may enhance our self-esteem by “basking in the reflected glory” of our ingroups or of other people we know.
• If other people’s actions threaten our sense of self according to self-evaluation maintenance theory, we may engage in a variety of strategies aimed at redefining our self-concept and rebuilding our self-esteem.
• The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status, is known as self-presentation, and it is a basic and natural part of everyday life. Different self-presentation strategies may be used to create different emotions in other people.
• We often use self-presentation in the longer term, seeking to build and sustain particular reputations with specific social audiences.
• The individual-difference variable of self-monitoring relates to the ability and desire to self-present.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Describe some aspects of your self-concept that have been created through social comparison.
• Describe times when you have engaged in downward and upward social comparison and the effects these comparisons have had on your self-esteem. To what extent do your experiences fit with the research evidence here?
• What are your most salient social identities? How do they create positive feelings for you?
• Outline a situation where someone else’s behavior has threatened your self-concept. Which of the strategies outlined in relation to self-evaluation maintenance theory did you engage in to rebuild your self-concept?
• Identify a situation where you basked in the reflected glory of your ingroup’s behavior or peformance. What effect did this have on your self-esteem and why?
• Describe some situations where people you know have used each of the self-presentation strategies that were listed in this section. Which strategies seem to be more and less effective in helping them to achieve their social goals, and why?
• Consider your own level of self-monitoring. Do you think that you are more of a high or a low self-monitor, and why? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages for you of the level of self-monitoring that you have?

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• 25947 reads
• Authors & Informations
• About the Book
• The History of Social Psychology
• The Person and the Social Situation
• Evolutionary Adaptation and Human Characteristics
• Self-Concern
• Other-Concern
• Social Psychology in the Public Interest
• Social Influence Creates Social Norms
• Different Cultures Have Different Norms Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Social Cognition: Thinking and Learning about Others
• Social Affect: Feelings about Ourselves and Others
• Social Behavior: Interacting with Others Key Takeaways Exercise and Critical Thinking
• The Importance of Scientific Research
• Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition
• Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain
• Observational Research
• The Research Hypothesis
• Correlational Research
• Experimental Research
• Factorial Research Designs
• Deception in Social Psychology Experiments
• Interpreting Research Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Chapter Summary
• Our Knowledge Accumulates as a Result of Learning
• Operant Learning
• Associational Learning Video
• Observational Learning Video
• Schemas as Social Knowledge
• How Schemas Develop: Accommodation and Assimilation
• How Schemas Maintain Themselves: The Power of Assimilation Research Focus: The Confirmation Bias Research Focus: Schemas as Energy Savers Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Automatic versus Controlled Cognition Research Focus: Behavioral Effects of Priming
• Salience and Accessibility Determine Which Expectations We Use
• Cognitive Accessibility
• The False Consensus Bias Makes Us Think That Others Are More Like Us Than They Really Are
• Perceptions of What “Might Have Been” Lead to Counterfactual Thinking
• Anchoring and Adjustment Lead Us to Accept Ideas That We Should Revise
• Overconfidence
• The Importance of Cognitive Biases in Everyday Life
• Social Psychology in the Public Interest Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Affect Influences Cognition
• The Power of Positive Cognition
• Cognition About Affect: The Case of Affective Forecasting Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Social Cognition
• Development and Characteristics of the Self-Concept
• Self-Complexity and Self-Concept Clarity
• Overestimating How Closely and Accurately Others View Us Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Self-Esteem The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale
• Maintaining and Enhancing Self-Esteem Research Focus: Processing Information to Enhance the Self
• The Looking-Glass Self: Our Sense of Self is Influenced by Others’ Views of Us
• Social Comparison Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by Comparisons with Others Research Focus: Affiliation and Social Comparison
• Upward and Downward Comparisons Influence Our Self-Esteem
• Social Identity Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Groups We Belong To A Measure of Social Identity
• Self-Presentation: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Audiences We Have Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about the Self
• Attitudes Are Evaluations
• Some Attitudes Are Stronger Than Others
• When Do Our Attitudes Guide Our Behavior? Research Focus: Attitude-Behavior Consistency Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Choosing Effective Communicators
• Creating Effective Communications
• Spontaneous Message Processing
• Thoughtful Message Processing
• Which Route Do We Take: Thoughtful or Spontaneous?
• Self-Perception Involves Inferring Our Beliefs from Our Behaviors Research Focus: Looking at Our Own Behavior to Determine Our Attitudes
• Creating Insufficient Justification and Overjustification
• The Experience of Cognitive Dissonance Can Create Attitude Change
• We Reduce Dissonance by Decreasing Dissonant or by Increasing Consonant Cognitions
• Cognitive Dissonance in Everyday Life
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Attitudes, Behavior, and Persuasion
• Nonverbal Behavior
• Detecting Danger by Focusing on Negative Information Social Psychology in the Public Interest: Detecting Deception
• Judging People by Their Traits
• Combining Traits: Information Integration
• The Importance of the Central Traits Warm and Cold
• First Impressions Matter: The Primacy Effect Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Making Inferences about Personality
• Detecting the Covariation between Personality and Behavior
• Attributions for Success and Failure Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Are Our Attributions Accurate?
• The Fundamental Attribution Error
• The Actor-Observer Bias
• Self-Serving Biases
• Group-Serving Biases
• Victim-Blaming Biases Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Perceiver Characteristics Research Focus: How Our Attributions Can Influence Our School Performance
• Attributional Styles and Mental Health Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Person Perception
• Informational Social Influence: Conforming to Be Accurate
• Normative Social Influence: Conforming to Be Liked and to Avoid Rejection
• Majority Influence: Conforming to the Group
• Minority Influence: Resisting Group Pressure
• The Size of the Majority
• The Unanimity of the Majority
• The Importance of the Task Research Focus: How Task Importance and Confidence Influence Conformity Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Reward Power
• Coercive Power
• Legitimate Power
• Referent Power
• Expert Power Research Focus: Does Power Corrupt?
• Personality and Leadership
• Leadership as an Interaction between the Person and the Situation Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Person Differences
• Gender Differences
• Cultural Differences
• Psychological Reactance Key Takeaways Exercise and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Social Influence
• Physical Attractiveness
• Why Is Physical Attractiveness So Important?
• Why Does Similarity Matter?
• Status Similarity
• Affect and Attraction Research Focus: Arousal and Attraction Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Closeness and Intimacy
• Communal and Exchange Relationships
• Interdependence and Commitment
• What Is Love? Research Focus: Romantic Love Reduces Our Attention to Attractive Others
• Making Relationships Last
• When Relationships End Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Liking and Loving
• Reciprocity and Social Exchange
• Social Reinforcement and Altruism: The Role of Rewards and Costs
• Social Norms for Helping Research Focus: Moral Hypocrisy Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Positive Moods Increase Helping
• Relieving Negative Emotions: Guilt Increases Helping
• Personal Distress and Empathy as Determinants of Helping Research Focus: Personal Distress versus Empathy as Determinants of Helping Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Latané and Darley’s Model of Helping
• Interpreting
• Taking Responsibility
• Implementing Action Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Some People Are More Helpful Than Others: The Altruistic Personality
• Who Do We Help? Attributions and Helping
• Reactions to Receiving Help
• Cultural Issues in Helping
• Increasing Helping Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Altruism
• Is Aggression Evolutionarily Adaptive?
• The Role of Biology in Aggression
• Hormones Influence Aggression: Testosterone and Serotonin
• Drinking Alcohol Increases Aggression
• Negative Emotions Cause Aggression Research Focus: The Effects of Provocation and Fear of Death on Aggression
• Can We Reduce Negative Emotions by Engaging in Aggressive Behavior? Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Social Learning and Modeling: Is Aggression Learned?
• Violence Creates More Violence: Television, Video Games, and Handguns Research Focus: The Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression
• Why Does Viewing Violence Lead to Aggression? Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Individual Differences in Aggression
• Gender Differences in Aggression
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Aggression
• Communication, Interdependence, and Group Structure
• Social Identity
• The Stages of Group Development Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Social Facilitation and Social Inhibition
• Person Variables: Group Member Characteristics
• The Importance of the Social Situation: Task Characteristics
• Social Loafing Research Focus: Differentiating Coordination Losses from Social Loafing Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Process Gains in Group versus Individual Decision Making
• Process Losses Due to Group Conformity Pressures: Groupthink
• Cognitive Process Losses: Lack of Information Sharing Research Focus: Poor Information Sharing in Groups
• Cognitive Process Losses: Ineffective Brainstorming
• Motivating Groups to Perform Better by Appealing to Self-Interest
• Cognitive Approaches: Improving Communication and Information Sharing
• Setting Appropriate Goals
• Group Member Diversity: Costs and Benefits Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Social Groups
• Spontaneous Social Categorization
• The Benefits of Social Categorization
• Liking “Us” More Than “Them”: Ingroup Favoritism
• The Outcomes of Ingroup Favoritism
• Ingroup Favoritism Has Many Causes
• When Ingroup Favoritism Does Not Occur
• Personality and Cultural Determinants of Ingroup Favoritism Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Reducing Discrimination by Changing Social Norms
• Reducing Prejudice through Intergroup Contact Research Focus: The Extended-Contact Hypothesis
• Moving Others Closer to Us: The Benefits of Recategorization Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination
• Competition and Conflict
• Social Fairness
• How the Social Situation Creates Conflict: The Role of Social Dilemmas Learning Objectives
• Characteristics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
• Variations on the Prisoner’s Dilemma
• Resource Dilemma Games Research Focus: The Trucking Game
• Who Cooperates and Who Competes? Research Focus: Self- and Other-Orientations in Social Dilemmas
• Gender and Cultural Differences in Cooperation and Competition Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Task Characteristics and Perceptions
• Privatization
• The Important Role of Communication
• The Tit-for-Tat Strategy
• Formal Solutions to Conflict: Negotiation, Mediation, and Arbitration Key Takeaways Exercise and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Cooperation and Competition
•  Back Matter

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Module 3: The Self

Module Overview

Human beings, by their very nature, are prone to focus on the self and to engage in behavior to protect it. Module 3 will cover some of the ways this occurs. We will start by focusing on the self-concept or who we are and self-schemas. We will also discuss self-perception theory, possible selves, the self-reference effect, self-discrepancies, how others affect our sense of self, and cultural differences of the self. Then we will tackle the issue of self-esteem and its two forms – global and domain specific. Self-esteem across the life span and gender and cross-cultural differences will be examined. We will discuss how self-esteem is affected, and protected, when mortality is made salient, self-efficacy and locus of control, self-regulation, self-awareness, and self-enhancement. Our third section will cover self-presentation and specific strategies we use such as self-promotion, ingratiation, false modesty, self-verification, and self-monitoring. Finally, we will discuss cognitive biases and heuristics used to defend the self, such as the self-serving bias, false consensus effect, false uniqueness effect, and unrealistic optimism and defensive pessimism.

Module Outline

3.1. The Self-Concept

3.2. self-esteem, 3.3. self-presentation, 3.4. cognitive biases and heuristics used to bolster the self.

Module Learning Outcomes

• Define the self-concept and clarify how we learn about the self.
• Define self-esteem and describe efforts we engage in to protect or improve it.
• Describe ways we make ourselves appear in a more positive light to others.
• Outline cognitive biases and heuristics used to defend the self.

Section Learning Objectives

• Define self-concept and clarify whether it is stable or malleable.
• Define and exemplify self-schemas.
• Describe self-perception theory and how it helps us learn about the self.
• Clarify the importance of possible selves.
• Describe the self-reference effect.
• Define self-discrepancy theory.
• Describe Cooley’s concept of the looking-glass self.
• Define reflected appraisal.
• Describe the social comparison theory and how it helps us to learn about the self.
• Clarify the importance of the two-factor-theory of emotion for the self.
• Describe cultural differences in the conception of the self.

3.1.1. The Age-Old Question – Who Are You?

Quite possibly the fundamental question of human existence is who we are. If asked who you are by another person, how would you describe yourself? Are you smart, resourceful, compassionate, petty, empathetic, self-serving, or optimistic? Are you good at sports or do you write poetry well? Should any singing you do be reserved for the shower? These descriptors are what make up our self-concept or the way we see ourselves. This view is probably clear most of the time. If you are not talented at writing, you will likely avoid writing intensive classes as a student. Some classes you cannot avoid, and so in these instances you will seek out extra help so that you are successful with the class. If you are incredibly talented at football, you may go out for the team but will not likely try out for the baseball team. But are there times when you are not so sure about who you are? The answer is likely yes. Maybe you and your spouse are considering adopting. Though you consider yourself a compassionate person, you are not sure you can open your heart up to another child the same way you would to a biological child. In this case, you have no prior experience to reference to determine who you are in this situation.

3.1.1.1. Is self-concept stable or malleable? There are two contradictory views of the self. Though our self-concept is relatively stable and people resist any information that contradicts their view of themselves (Greenwald, 1980), specific social environments can cause different selves to appear (Martindale, 1980). Markus and Kunda (1986) explored this dual nature of the self-concept in a study of 40 female students at the University of Michigan who participated to earn credit in their introductory psychology class (recall our discussion in Module 2 of convenience samples and issues with generalizability as a result). The participants were run one at a time and with three female confederates who were also undergraduate students but paid for their involvement. The researchers used minimal deception and led the participants to believe the study was on attitudes and opinions. They were first shown posters in a series of three trials. The posters had three items on them, either three colors, cartoons, or greeting cards, and the participant was asked to record for each poster the number of the item she liked best (of the three). The experimenter then explained that she had to transfer the responses to a computer coding sheet and that it would make life easier if all participants (the actual participant and the three confederates) could read their responses out loud. On each trial the participant went first, followed by the confederates. Her responses determined what the confederates would say. In the uniqueness condition, on all but 3 of the 18 trials the confederates all disagreed with the participant but agreed with one another. So if the participant preferred Color A the confederates all chose C. On the other three trials, the first confederate agreed with the participant while the other two disagreed with her and with each other. In the similarity condition, on all but 3 of the trials, the confederates agreed with the participant. If she chose Color C, then so did the three confederates. On the other three trials, none of the confederates agreed with the participant and two agreed with each other (meaning if the participant chose C, one chose A and two chose B, for instance). The participant then completed a series of dependent measures to include judgments of similarity to reference groups, self-categorization judgments, and word association. There was also a manipulation check such that participants were asked what percentage of the time they thought other participants agreed with their preference judgment in the first part of the study. Debriefing then occurred.

Results showed that for the manipulation check, subjects were aware of the extent to which participants agreed with them. The uniqueness group stated that the others agreed with them just 8% of the time while the similarity subjects estimated 77% of the time. The authors note that there was actually 17% and 83% agreement, respectively. In terms of how stable self-concept is, results showed that neither group appeared to have been influenced by the information about their similarity or uniqueness. In terms of the malleability of self-concept, the differences in the latencies between the two conditions for self-categorization judgments (i.e. their reaction times), suggests that different types of self-conceptions were mediating these judgments. This was also seen in the similarity to reference groups task such that both conditions felt more similar to in-groups than out-groups. It should be noted that the effect was not as strong for the similarity condition as their mean judgment of similarity to the in-group ( M = 4.93) was not as strong as the uniqueness condition ( M = 5.13), and their judgment of out-groups was higher ( M = 2.26) than the uniqueness condition ( M = 1.82).

Markus and Kunda (1986) conclude that both the stability and malleability of the self-concept were demonstrated in their study, though if one only looked at the results of the first part of the study (the showing of the posters with the three items to choose from) “one would tend to infer that the self-conceptions of these individuals were relatively unresponsive to the self-relevant information provided by the study” (pg. 864). Further examination of the word association, latency, and similarity tasks show that “…underlying these similar general self-descriptions were very different temporary self-conceptions” (pg. 864). When individuals were led to feel unique, they became disturbed by this and following the preference manipulation viewed their uniqueness as negative while the state of similarity to others became positive and desirable. They recruited conceptions of themselves as similar to others and made these endorsements relatively quickly (as shown through shorter latencies). Those made to feel extremely similar to others responded in the exact opposite way.

Finally, they say that the self-concept is a set of self-conceptions and from it, “the individual constructs a working self-concept that integrates the core self-conceptions with those elicited by the immediate context. In this sense, the self-concept becomes similar to that suggested by the symbolic interactionists. Thus, for Mead (1934) there was no fixed self-concept, only the current self-concept that was negotiated from the available set of self-conceptions” (Markus and Kunda, 1986, pg. 865).

3.1.2. Self-Schemas

As we interact with our world, we gather information that we need to organize in a way that we can obtain it again when needed. Basically, we store it away in memory and retrieve it when we encounter the person, object, or concept at a later time. This element of cognition is called a schema and as we can have schemas concerning external objects or ideas, we too can have them about ourselves, called a self-schema. These self-schemas make up our self-concept in much the same way that the words on this page make up the module you are reading, and this module is just one of many in the textbook. Markus (1977) defined self-schemata as, “cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize and guide the processing of the self-related information contained in an individual’s social experiences (pg. 64).”

Self-schemas represent a person’s domain specific attributes or abilities and experiences as they relate to that domain. This allows for quicker encoding, more confident evaluation, accurate retrieval of domain-relevant information, and the ability to adapt to different information processing goals (Carpenter, 1988; Greenwald, 1980; Markus, 1977). Individuals with a self-schema in a domain are said to be schematic while those lacking one are aschematic for that ability (Cross & Markus, 1994). According to Markus (1977), aschematic individuals are not able to recognize their ability in a given domain and do not assign their ability any critical personal importance.

They can also help to shape social perception when the description of person is ambiguous. One study showed that when a target (Chris) is described as equally likely to be independent or dependent, participants classified as independence-schematics rated Chris as more independent and dependence-schematics rated him as more dependent or less likely to act independently compared to aschematics. The authors say that self-schemas serve a motivational role such that they help to foster the self-system’s stability, validation, and perpetuation (Green & Sedikides, 2001).

3.1.2.1. Types of self-schemas. Prieto, Cole, and Tageson (1992) compared depressed, clinic-referred children; nondepressed, clinic-referred children; and nondepressed, non-clinic referred children on three cognitive measures of positive and negative self-schemas. On a word recognition measure and an incidental word recall measure, depressed individuals had a less positive self-schema compared to the other two groups. Only non-depressed groups recalled significantly more positive words than negative ones. The results suggest that such negative self-schemas affect how new information is stored and accessed. Another study found that depressive self-schemas were a result of peer victimization such that individuals who experienced relational and verbal victimization more so than physical victimization by their peers had stronger negative and weaker positive self-cognitions and an elimination of the “normative memorial bias for recall of positive self-referential words” (Cole et al., 2014).

Self-schemas have also been identified for race-ethnicity (Oyserman, 2008; Oyserman et al., 2003), body weight (Altabe & Thompson, 1996; Markus, Hamill, & Sentis, 1987), gender (Markus, Crane, Bernstein, & Siladi, 1982), exercise (Kendzierski, 1990), religion (McIntosh, 1995), and illness (Clemmey & Nicassio, 1997), to name a few. Lodge and Hamill (1986) even propose a partisan schema related to political knowledge and interest. Those described as schematics are high in interest and knowledge and show a “consistency bias” such that they recall more policy statements consistent with a congressman’s party affiliation than those inconsistent with it. They also can classify campaign statements as Republican or Democrat. Aschematics, or those low in interest and knowledge, perform at no better than chance levels in the same task. The authors note that the restructuring of memory shown by schematics, and in particular those scoring especially high on interest and knowledge which they call sophisticates, demonstrates a serious bias in how political information is processed.

3.1.2.2. Self-perception theory. One way we gain knowledge about ourselves is through observing ourselves, called introspection or looking inward. We notice food preferences, particular music genres we like, the types of clothing we prefer to wear, and the type of person we consider to be a friend. But what we gain self-knowledge about tends to be things that are not central or critical (Bem, 1972). Why is that? The things about us that are most important make up the attitudes we express, the beliefs we hold, the traits we display, and the emotions we prefer to display and so are at our core. Self-perception helps us to learn about the more secondary aspects of the self.

3.1.2.3. Possible selves. Not only are we concerned about the person we are right now, but we focus on the person we might become, which Markus and Nurius (1986) call possible selves . These could be positive conceptions of our future self, but likewise, they could be something we are afraid of becoming and could elicit guilt and anxiety in the individual (Carver et al., 1999). According to Inglehart, Markus, and Brown (1988) our possible selves allow us to focus attention on specific, task-relevant cognitions, emotions and actions, thereby allowing us to move from our current state to the desired one (Oyserman & Markus, 1990a), especially when a possible self is seen as a self-regulator (i.e. a student who spends more time on homework, improved grades, and participated in class more because they realize they are not doing well now, but could in the future if they engage in specific types of behaviors; Oyserman et al., 2004). Across two studies, Cross and Markus (1994) showed that schematic individuals were better able to direct their attention to the problem at hand and concentrate on it while aschematic individuals were quicker to endorse negative possible selves related to logical reasoning ability. Hence, self-schemas can help foster competence by “providing a foundation for the development of possible selves related to that ability” (pg. 434). They continue, “…the possible self may link effective steps and strategies for solving reasoning problems with beliefs about one’s ability and competence in the domain. Bringing to mind a positive, desired view of oneself in the future as logical and analytical may also help the student dispel anxiety or worry during the task” (pg. 435). Research has also shown that when balance between feared and expected possible selves does not exist, the outcomes can be negative such as the initiation and maintenance of delinquent activity in adolescents (Oyserman and Markus, 1990b).

3.1.2.4. The self-reference effect. Would it surprise you to learn that humans have a tendency to more efficiently process, and recall more accurately, information about ourselves? Probably not. This is called the self-reference effect (Higgins & Bargh, 1987). Craik and Lockhart (1972) proposed the depth of processing (DOP) framework which says that how well a memory trace is retained is determined by the nature of the encoding operations such that deep, meaningful analyses result in a more durable trace than shallow, structural analyses of a stimulus. Up to 1977 it was believed that better retention could be achieved by semantic encoding though Rogers, Kuiper, and Kriker (1977) showed that self-referent encoding produced even better recall. The self-reference effect has since been replicated in numerous studies (for an overview of this research, please see Symons & Johnson, 1997).

Since the self-reference effect is a property of memory, we might expect that it is affected by the aging process. Across three studies, Gutchess, et al., (2007) showed that under some circumstances, older adults can benefit from self-referencing as much as young adults can but in general, they are more limited in their application of it. The authors speculate that “older adults may be limited in their application of self-referencing due to its demand on cognitive resources and their diminished ability to apply the strategy flexibly and broadly in other types of evaluative judgments” (pg. 834).

In terms of what area of the brain might control the self-reference effect, research using lesioning has found a role for the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Patients with focal brain damage to the mPFC were given a standard trait judgment paradigm and damage to this area was found to abolish the self-reference effect, suggesting that the structure is important for self-referential processing and the neural representation of the self (Philippi et al., 2012). The implications of this research go beyond social psychology, too. The authors write, “The ability to detect and encode information for self-relevance might contribute not only to the formation of a self-concept, but also more broadly to psychological and social functioning. Across a variety of psychopathological conditions and personality disorders, self-referential processing appears to be dysfunctional, making it a major target for psychotherapy.” To read this article yourself, please visit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3297026/ .

3.1.3. Self-Discrepancies

Self-discrepancy theory was postulated by Higgins (1987) to distinguish between the various self-states proposed by sociology, psychology, and even philosophy. Higgins says there are two cognitive dimensions which underlie the various self-state representations. The first is the domains of the self , numbering three total – the actual, ideal, and ought selves. The actual self includes the attributes that you are believed to possess, whether by yourself or another person. The ideal self includes all attributes that someone, whether you or another person, hope or wishes for you to possess. The ought self are the attributes that someone (yourself or another person) believes you should possess (i.e. linked to a sense of duty, obligation, or responsibility). Higgins exemplifies the ideal and ought self through the example of the conflict a hero faces between their personal wishes and their sense of duty.

The second cognitive dimension is what he calls standpoints on the self , or whose perspective on the self is involved. The two basic standpoints are your own personal standpoint and the standpoint from a significant other such as a spouse, parent, sibling, or close friend. A person can have a self-state representation for any number of these significant others.

The two cognitive dimensions can then be combined to form six basic types of self-state representations: actual/own, actual/other, ideal/own, ideal/other, ought/own, and ought/other. Our self-concept is derived from the first two, while the last four are self-directive standards or acquired guides for being, or as he calls them, self-guides . Self-discrepancy theory therefore proposes that people differ as to which self-guide they are motivated to meet, and that people do not necessarily possess all four (we might have only ought or ideal self-guides). We are motivated to “reach a condition where our self-concept matches our personally relevant self-guides” (pg. 321).

If this does not happen, we can experience sadness, disappointment, fear, dissatisfaction, apprehension, or feel threatened. For instance, if a discrepancy exists between the actual/own and ideal/own states, meaning the person feels their personal hopes or wishes have not been fulfilled, they will be vulnerable to dejected-related emotions such as disappointment, frustration, and dissatisfaction. If the discrepancy is between actual/own and ideal/other, meaning they have failed to obtain a significant other’s hopes or wishes for them, they may feel shame, embarrassment, or feel downcast. If the discrepancy is between actual/own and ought/other, meaning the current state of our attributes from our standpoint does not match the state the person believes some significant other considers to be our duty or obligation to obtain, then we might experience agitation-related emotions and feel fear or threatened. Finally, an actual/own and ought/own discrepancy occurs when the current state of our attributes, from our standpoint, do not match the state we believe is our duty or obligation to obtain and so we feel self-contempt, guilt, and uneasiness (Higgins, 1987).

In sum, self-discrepancy theory helps us to understand discrepancies between our view of our self and who we would ideally like to be or believe other people think we should be.

3.1.4. How Others Affect Our Sense of Self

3.1.4.1. The looking-glass self. Sociologist Charles Cooley (1902) stated that people based their sense of self on how they think others see them. This social interaction serves as a sort of mirror in which people use the judgments of others to measure their own worth, behavior, and values. He calls this the looking-glass self , and it occurs in three steps. First, we imagine how we appear to others when in a social situation. Second, we imagine what others think of our appearance. Third, we form opinions and feelings about this perceived judgment and then respond to it. Let’s say for instance you are assigned to a small group in your social psychology class and are asked to discuss the topic of self-discrepancy theory. You have not interacted with these individuals thus far this semester, and so you want to demonstrate to these fellow students that you are knowledgeable of the concept. As you discuss the material, you take note of how your fellow classmates respond to your thoughts and applications of the concept of self-discrepancy theory. What is their body language? Do they maintain eye contact with you? Do they seem to be distracted or are they focused? What words do they use in response to your comments? If your classmates generally have positive feedback such as commenting constructively on your thoughts or listening intently, you will feel confident that they see you as competent and knowledgeable. If, on the other hand, they look away often, are playing a game on their phone, or have negative comments, you will likely feel that they do not see you as knowledgeable. To make matters more complicated, in the future your professor has you work with a different group of classmates for a different activity. The new task provides a different context for the interaction and the new set of students changes the nature of those involved. So, how you use the information obtained from this new group of individuals will likely be different than the first group. And of course, not all feedback carries the same weight. Maybe you know one of your group members is an A student and doing very well in the class. If they provide positive feedback this will mean more to you than a student praising your analysis who you know is struggling.

3.1.4.2. Reflected appraisals. Building off Cooley’s work, Felson (1985) said that we come to see ourselves as those important to us see us, called a reflected appraisal. In an interesting study of adolescents from the Netherlands, Verkuyten (1988) found that the general self-esteem of ethnic minorities was relatively high, despite the fact that they have low status, experience discrimination and prejudice, and have little power to influence policymakers. So why was their self-esteem higher than expected? As support for the reflected appraisal process, they derived their self-esteem from fellow family members who regarded them highly.

3.1.4.3. Social comparison theory. Oftentimes, we are uncertain of our abilities and so look to others for a clue. A college baseball player may compare his batting average against those of his teammates to see how well he is doing. Festinger (1954) called this the social comparison theory . We make such comparisons as a way to bring about self-improvement or to motivate us to be better. If the players’ batting average is not the lowest, but close, he may ask for additional batting practice or tips from the batting coach. We also compare ourselves to others to enhance our positive self-image. If the player learns that his batting average is better than most of his teammates, he will feel good about his hitting ability. Of course, he might also develop a superior attitude or become biased or judgmental.

How might social media affect the social comparisons we make? Social networking sites such as Facebook give the impression that others are doing better than they are which can be detrimental to how we view ourselves. In a study of 231 adults aged 18-25, Facebook use was found to lead to greater levels of negative social comparison which resulted in seeing oneself as less socially competent and less physically attractive. This effect was weaker among happier individuals (de Vries & Kuhne, 2015).  A similar study of Instagram “likes” found that exposing female undergraduates to thin-ideal images led to greater levels of body and facial dissatisfaction than average images and that greater investment in Instagram likes led to higher levels of appearance comparison and facial dissatisfaction (Tiggerman et al., 2018).

The benefit of social comparison is that it can lead to efforts to self-improve. How so? We could make a specific type of social comparison called an upward social comparison in which we compare our traits and abilities against someone who is more skilled than we are. This can lead us to engage in motivated behavior to improve, but it could also leave us feeling incompetent, shameful, or jealous (Collins, 1996).

3.1.4.4. Arousal as information about us. Stimuli are forever present in our sensory world and we have perceptions of them. These perceptions lead us to respond. For example, if you are walking down a street and hear footsteps behind you, you might perceive this as a threat if it is late at night and you thought you were alone on the street. This could lead you to walk quicker to your car or house or turnaround to confront the person behind you. What if you heard footsteps but is the middle of the day, on campus, and in between classes? You would likely perceive this as just another student going to class and have no reaction. Schachter (1964) proposed his two-factor theory of emotion which states that how we perceive our own emotions depends on two factors: 1) how much physiological arousal we experience such as rapid breathing, sweating, and/or a pounding heart, and 2) the cognitive interpretation or label we apply such as angry, scared, or happy. Others help us with the second factor such that we will examine their reactions to a given situation to help us interpret the arousal we are experiencing. Say for instance we are at a movie and out of nowhere the killer jumps out and attacks the protagonist. When this happens, we jump in our seat and scream, and notice that other moviegoers have the same reaction. We thus realize we experienced a high level of arousal and label the emotion as scared. Soon after we likely laugh at ourselves since we knew all along the event was not real but a mere fiction on the screen.

3.1.5. The Self and Culture

The self does not exist on an island but in the context of the society and culture in which it lives. As such, there is a great deal of variability in terms of what the self-concept is from culture to culture. First, culture includes all the beliefs, customs, institutions, experience, values, attitudes, art, religion, etc. of a group of people. Each culture establishes norms , or rules, for how its members should behave. For instance, Western cultures view the self as independent or individualistic , meaning that individuals reject conformity, focus on individual traits and goals, and seek personal achievement while Asian cultures are interdependent or collectivistic and identify the self in a social context, believe in blending in, focus on group goals, promote solidarity, and are against egotism.  According to Markus and Kitayma (1991) the independent construal of self is bounded, unitary, and stable; focuses on being unique, realizing internal attributes, and promoting ones’ goals; and sees the role of others as self-appraisal and linked to social comparison and reflected appraisal. In terms of the interdependent self, they say the structure is flexible; the task is to belong and fit in, occupy one’s place and promote other’s goals; and our relationships with others in specific contexts define the self. The independent is internal and private, focused on one’s abilities, thoughts, and feelings while the interdependent is external and public, and focused on statuses, roles, and relationships (Markus & Kitayma, 1991).

Research shows that East Asians, namely those from Korea, have more flexibility in their self-concept compared to Americans (Choi & Choi, 2002) and that Asian Americans, compared to European Americans, show variability across relationship contexts but stability within them (English & Serena, 2007). In another study, when trait self-perceptions across different relationships were inconsistent, relationship quality and authenticity was lower for European Americans but not East Asian Americans. When there was inconsistency within the same relationship, both ethnic groups showed negative outcomes (English & Chen, 2011).

• Describe how self-esteem is a need.
• Identify and define types of self-esteem.
• Clarify what happens to self-esteem across the life span.
• Clarify if there are gender and cross-cultural differences in self-esteem.
• Define Terror Management Theory and clarify its relevance to self-esteem.
• Describe self-efficacy and locus of control and how they relate to the self.
• Define self-regulation.
• Define self-awareness and describe issues related to it.
• Differentiate public and private self-consciousness.
• Define self-enhancement and describe strategies used in it.

3.2.1. Self-Esteem Defined and Described

3.2.1.1. Self-esteem as a need. Psychologist Abraham Maslow described a hierarchy of needs as one way to understand motivation and specifically the push of motivated behavior (contrasted with the pull that comes from outside us). According to Maslow, there are five types of needs arranged in a hierarchy, or more so in a pyramid formation. Lower level needs must be fulfilled before higher level ones can be. At the bottom are the physiological needs which are what we need to survive. They include food, water, sex, temperature, oxygen, etc. At the next level are needs centered on our safety and security , or living in a safe environment, being safe from Mother Nature, and having enough money to pay the bills. With this level satisfied, we can next focus on feeling socially connected to others and being in mature relationships, which he called the love and belonginess needs . Fourth are our self-esteem needs or being independent, gaining mastery, how we feel about ourselves, and being responsible. At the pinnacle of the pyramid are our self-actualization needs , which Carl Rogers and other humanistic psychologists discussed. This level focuses on realizing our full potential, feeling fulfilled and satisfied, and seeking personal growth. We also pursue interests out of intrinsic interest and not extrinsic demands. For our purposes, Maslow’s fourth level will be focused on and self-esteem can be defined as how we see ourselves, including both positive and negative evaluative components.

3.2.1.2. Types of self-esteem. Is self-esteem a unitary concept though? Rosenberg (1979) proposed a global self-esteem and subsequent research has supported domain specific self-esteem such as for academic matters (Rosenberg et al., 1995). So, which causes which? Does global self-esteem lead to specific or vice versa? The authors propose that global could be the result of specific self-esteem since it is “based on the judgments of various parts of the self, the parts (specifics) might be seen as responsible for the whole (global)” (pg. 148). In terms of the specific arising from global, they say, “assessments of particular facets of the self may well be based on one’s overall feelings of self-worth” (pg. 148). They conclude that global and specific self-esteem are in fact neither equivalent nor interchangeable, global appears to be heavily affective in nature and associated with psychological well-being while specific is more judgmental and evaluative arising from a cognitive component; specific facets of the self vary in their level of abstraction and some types such as academic self-esteem affect global self-esteem more than other types; the degree to which we value our behavior affects how much specific self-esteem affects global; and finally, in the case of school performance it is affected by self-esteem but in terms of the specific type and not global (Rosenberg et al., 1995).

What are some of the specific types of self-esteem.? According to Gentile et al. (2009) they might include:

• Physical appearance – what we look like
• Athletics – how good we are in sports
• Academics – our general performance in school
• Social Acceptance – our friendships, peer relationships, and social approval
• Family – Our family can serve as a source support and help affirm our beliefs about our own self-worth
• Behavioral conduct – includes our perception of how socially unacceptable our behavior is
• Affect – Feeling happy, satisfied, and free from anxiety which lead to better emotional well-being
• Personal self – Our evaluation of our personality independent from the physical body or others
• Self-satisfaction – Our measure of happiness with oneself as a person
• Moral-ethical self-concept – Our perception of moral-ethical attributes and how satisfied we are with our religion or lack of one

3.2.1.3. Self-esteem across the life span. Our next question centers on whether self-esteem can change throughout our life. Trzesniewski et al., (2003) tested this very question across two studies and found that, “stability is relatively low during early childhood, increases through adolescence and young adulthood, and then declines during midlife and old age” (pg. 215). This effect held across gender, nationality, and ethnicity. How can we account for these trends? First, self-esteem was least stable during childhood, though the authors question whether self-esteem measures are valid for young children as they may not fully understand the meaning of questions on such scales or cannot form abstract concepts of themselves, such as being good or bad. Second, self-esteem is lower in early adolescence and increases after this likely due to the turmoil puberty brings about in terms of rapid maturational changes. By late adolescence and early adulthood, the individual has the resources and autonomy necessary to deal with these changes. Finally, self-esteem stability decreases from midlife to old age likely because in midlife there are few environmental changes but as we transition into late adulthood, there are a great deal of life changes and shifting social circumstances such as children moving out, retirement, health problems and the death of loved ones. In regard to late adulthood, they add, “Another possibility is that as individuals age they may begin to review their lifelong accomplishments and experiences, leading in some cases to more critical self-appraisals and in other cases to greater acceptance of their faults and limitations” (pg. 216).

Interestingly, data from 187 newlywed couples shows that the birth of the first child does affect self-esteem over the first five years of marriage. Changes mostly affect the mother and are negative in nature with a sudden decline in self-esteem the first year after the child’s birth and a gradual decline continuing over the next four years. The study utilized a control group of parents who had no child during the same period and for which there was no change in self-esteem. This suggests that the change in self-esteem of the parents with a child was likely due to the birth of their first child (Bleidorn et al., 2016).

3.2.1.4. Gender and cross-cultural differences in self-esteem. Gentile et al. (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies and assessed the 10 different domains of self-esteem mentioned at the end of the previous section. They found that gender differences vary greatly across the different domains of self-esteem. In some cases, there was no difference at all (i.e. academic, social acceptance, family, and affect), while other domains showed a moderate amount of variation (i.e. males higher on physical appearance, athletics, personal, and self-satisfaction; females higher on behavioral conduct and moral-ethical).

But are there cross-cultural differences in gender and self-esteem? Bleidorn et al. (2016) tackled the issue in an Internet sample of 985,937 individuals from 48 nations and found that self-esteem increased from late adolescence to middle adulthood, there were significant gender gaps, and that males consistently report higher self-esteem than females. These findings are important as they show that the trends, which are consistent with the literature but previous studies only examined Western samples, are in fact cross-culturally valid and suggest universal mechanisms at least in part. These mechanisms might include biological sources including genetics or hormones or universal sociocultural factors such as socially learned gender roles and stereotypes.

Despite these cross-cultural similarities, there was a difference across nations in terms of the magnitude of gender-specific trajectories, suggesting that universal explanations may not be at work but culture-specific influences such as a nation’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita, mean age at marriage, and HDI (Human Development Index; measures of living a long life, being educated, and having a decent standard of living) are responsible. Their data suggests that wealthy, developed, egalitarian, and individualistic nations had relatively large gender differences in self-esteem, though they decrease throughout early and middle adulthood. In contrast, collectivistic, poorer, developing nations marked by greater gender inequality and an earlier age at marriage show smaller gender gaps, though these increase during early and middle adulthood.

Bleidorn et. al. (2016) conclude that universal influences on self-esteem do not tell the whole story, and that “systematic cultural differences in the magnitude and shape of gender and age differences in self-esteem provide evidence for contextual influences on the self-esteem development in men and women” (pg. 408).

3.2.2. Terror Management Theory (TMT)

3.2.2.1. What is TMT? Ernest Becker (1962, 1973, & 1975) stated that it is the human capacity for intelligence, to be able to make decisions, think creatively, and infer cause and effect, that leads us to an awareness that we will someday die. This awareness manifests itself as terror and any cultural worldviews that are created need to provide ways to deal with this terror, create concepts and structures to understand our world, answer cosmological questions, and give us a sense of meaning in the world.

Based on this notion, Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon, 1986) posits that worldviews serve as a buffer against the anxiety we experience from knowing we will die someday. This cultural anxiety buffer has two main parts. First, we must have faith in our worldviews and be willing to defend them. Second, we derive self-esteem from living up to these worldviews and behaving in culturally approved ways. So, culture supports a belief in a just world and meeting the standards of value of the culture provides us with immortality in one of two ways. Literal immortality is arrived at via religious concepts such as the soul and the afterlife. Symbolic immortality is provided by linking our identity to something higher such as the nation or corporation and by leaving something behind such as children or cultural valued products. It has also been linked to the appeal of fame (Greenberg, Kosloff, Solomon, Cohen, and Landau, 2010).

Finally, based on whether death thoughts are in focal attention or are unconscious, we employ either proximal or distal defenses. Proximal defenses involve the suppression of death-related thoughts, a denial of one’s vulnerability, or participating in behavior that will reduce the threat of demise (i.e. exercise) and occur when thought of death is in focal attention. On the other hand, distal defenses are called upon when death thoughts are unconscious and involve strivings for self-esteem and faith in one’s worldview and assuage these unconscious mortality concerns through the symbolic protection a sense of meaning offers.

3.2.2.2. The typical mortality salience study. In a typical mortality salience (MS) study, participants are told they are to take part in an investigation of the relationship between personality traits and interpersonal judgments. They complete a few standardized personality assessments which are actually filler items to sustain the cover story. Embedded in the personality assessments is a projective personality test which consists of two open ended questions which vary based on which condition the participant is in. Participants in the MS condition are asked to write about what they think will happen to them when they die and the emotions that the thought of their own death arouses in them. Individuals in the control condition are asked to write about concerns such as eating a meal, watching television, experiencing dental pain, or taking an exam. Next, they complete a self-report measure of affect, typically the PANAS (Positive-Affect, Negative-Affect Scale), to determine the effect of MS manipulation on their mood. Finally, they are asked to make judgments about individuals who either directly or indirectly threaten or bolster their cultural worldviews.

3.2.2.3. Worldview defense. General findings on TMT have shown that when mortality is made salient, we generally display unfavorable attitudes toward those who threaten our worldview and celebrate those who uphold our view. This effect has been demonstrated in relation to anxious individuals even when part of one’s in-group (Martens, Greenberg, Schimel, Kosloff, and Weise, 2010) such that mortality reminders led participants to react more negatively toward an anxious police liaison from their community (Study 1) or to a fellow university student who was anxious (Study 2). Mortality salience has also been found to elevate preference for political candidates who are charismatic and espouse the same values associated with the participant’s political worldview, whether conservative or liberal (Kosloff, Greenberg, Weise, and Solomon, 2010).

Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Lyon (1989) examined reactions of participants to those who violated or upheld cultural worldviews across a series of six experiments. In general, they hypothesized that when people are reminded of their own mortality, they are motivated to maintain their cultural anxiety buffer and are punitive toward those who violate it and benevolent to those who uphold it. Experiments 1 and 3 provided support for the hypothesis that subjects induced to think about their own mortality increased their desire to punish the moral transgressor (i.e. to recommend higher bonds for an accused prostitute) while rewarding the hero (Experiment 3). Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and extended them by showing that increasing MS does not lead subjects to derogate just any target as it had no effect on evaluations of the experimenter. Also, MS increased punishment of the transgressor only among subjects who believed the target’s behavior was truly immoral.

Experiments 4 – 6 tested alternative explanations for the findings. First, self-awareness could lead individuals to behave in a manner consistent with their attitudes and standards.  The results of Study 4 showed that unlike MS, self-awareness does not encourage harsher bond recommendations and in fact, heightened self-awareness reduces how harshly a prostitute is treated among individuals with positive attitudes toward prostitution. In Study 5, physiological arousal was monitored and MS was found not to arise from mere heightened arousal. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that particular features of the open-ended death questionnaire did not lead to the findings of Studies 1-5, but rather to requiring subjects to think about their own deaths.

McGregor, Lieberman, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, Simon, and Pyszcznski (1998) tested the hypothesis that MS increases aggression against those who threaten one’s worldview by measuring the amount of hot sauce allocated to the author of a derogatory essay. In the study, politically conservative and liberal participants were asked to think about their own death (MS) or their next important exam (control). They were then asked to read an essay that was derogatory toward either conservatives or liberals. Finally, participants allocated a quantity of very spicy hot sauce to the author of the essay, knowing that the author did not like spicy foods and would have to consume the entire sample of hot sauce. As expected, MS participants allocated significantly more hot sauce to the author of the worldview-threatening essay than did control participants.

In a second study, participants thought about their own mortality or dental pain and were given an opportunity to aggress against someone who threatened their worldview. Half of the MS participants allocated the hot sauce before evaluating the target while the other half evaluated the target before allocating the hot sauce. Results of Study 2 showed that MS participants allocated significantly more hot sauce when they were not able to verbally derogate the targets prior to the administration of hot sauce. However, when MS participants were able to first express their attitudes toward the target, the amount of hot sauce allocated was not significantly greater than for the controls. This finding suggests that people will choose the first mode of worldview defense provided to them.

3.2.2.4. Self-esteem. According to the anxiety buffer hypothesis, if a psychological structure provides protection against anxiety, then strengthening that structure should make an individual less prone to displays of anxiety or anxiety related behavior in response to threats while weakening that structure should make a person more prone to exhibit anxiety or anxiety related behavior in response to threats. In support of this, Greenberg et al. (1992) showed that by increasing self-esteem, self-reported anxiety in response to death images and physiological arousal in response to the threat of pain could be reduced. Furthermore, the authors found no evidence that this effect was mediated by positive affect. Additional support for the function of self-esteem in reducing anxiety was provided by Harmon-Jones, Simon, Greenberg, Pyszcynski, Solomon, and McGregor (1997) who showed that individuals with high self-esteem, whether induced experimentally (Experiment 1) or dispositionally (Experiment 2), did not respond to MS with increased worldview defense and that this occurred due to the suppression of death constructs (Experiment 3).

3.2.3. Self-Efficacy and Locus of Control

Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1986) is our sense of competence and feeling like we can deal with life’s problems. It includes our beliefs about our ability to complete a task and affects how we think, feel, and motivate ourselves. When our self-efficacy is high, we feel like we can cope with life events and overcome obstacles. Difficult tasks are seen as challenges and we set challenging goals. In contrast, if it is low, we feel hopeless, helpless, and that we cannot handle what life throws at us. We avoid difficult tasks and throw in the towel quickly when things get tough. These individuals are easily depressed and stressed.

Our sense of competence is affected by the degree to which we blame internal or external forces for our success and failures. Using Julian Rotter’s (1973) concept of locus of control, we have an internal locus of control if we believe we are in control of our own destiny, but if we believe outside forces determine our life, we have an external locus of control.

So how do self-efficacy and locus of control intersect with one another. A study of students from a mid-sized public university in the northeastern area of the United States showed that students with an external locus of control and who are low in academic self-efficacy should be identified as they enter college and interventions directed at them to help them perform better in their classes (Drago, Rheinheimer, & Detweiler, 2018). A study of 147 women with type 1 diabetes examined the relationship between self-efficacy, locus of control, and what their expectations were of preconception counseling (Grady & Geller, 2016). Using the Diabetes-Specific Locus of Control (DLC) measure which assesses beliefs about internal, chance, and powerful others loci of control in terms of how diabetes is managed (the measure has 5 subscales: internal-autonomy, internal-blame, chance, powerful other – health professionals, and powerful other – nonmedical), a measure to assess preconception planning, and sociodemographic data,  the researchers tested the hypothesis that expectations of preconception counseling would be associated with beliefs about disease control and self-efficacy. The results showed that self-efficacy for planning a healthy pregnancy predicted outcome expectations of preconception counseling. The authors write, “…women’s self-efficacy was positively associated with their perceived usefulness of preconception counseling and birth control use, whereas self-blame about disease management negatively correlated with these views” (pg. 41). The authors suggest that efforts should be taken to improve self-efficacy and empower women with diabetes to confidently control their disease” (Grady & Geller, 2016).

3.2.4. Self-Regulation

We cannot always act or say what we feel. At times, we have to practice what social psychologists call self-regulation or controlling and directing our thoughts, feelings, and actions so that we can achieve a societal or personal goal. The good news is that much of our self-regulation occurs outside of conscious awareness but if we are trying to engage in meaningful behavioral change, we might have to focus much of our energy into self-control. One study linked successful self-regulation to executive functions to include updating, inhibiting, and shifting, which results in the ability to take goal-direction action such as losing weight (Dohle, Diel, & Hofmann, 2018).

Do concerted efforts at self-regulation reduce the amount of energy available for such activities in subsequent tasks? The question implies that self-regulation is a limited resource. Baumeister, Bratslasky, Muraven, and Tice (1998) tested this over four experiments and described this temporary reduction in the self’s ability to engage in volitional action caused by engaging in a volitional act previously ego depletion . The researchers first attempted to show that exerting self-control in terms of resisting temptation (Experiment 1) or a preliminary act of choice and responsibility (Experiment 2) would reduce the person’s ability to self-regulate on a subsequent, frustrating and difficult task. Results showed that people asked to resist eating chocolates and to make themselves eat radishes instead gave up much faster when next asked to complete a difficult puzzle than those who could indulge and eat the chocolate. Likewise, people who freely and deliberately consented to make a counterattitudinal or proattitudindal speech gave up quickly when asked to do the puzzle while those who expected to make the counterattitudinal speech under low-choice conditions showed no reduction in self-control. They state that it was the act of responsible choice, and not the behavior itself, that depleted the self and reduced persistence on the subsequent task. Experiments 3 and 4 further confirmed the finding that an initial act of volition leads to ego depletion in subsequent tasks. The good news is that this resource is replenished with time and specific factors could hasten or delay this replenishment (Baumeister et al., 1998).

3.2.5. Self-Awareness

Duval and Wicklund (1972) proposed that our self-regulation can either be directed inward and toward the self or directed outward and toward the environment. We are usually focused outward, but there are times when our attention is turned inward. For instance, if you walk by a mirror you might stop to see how you look in your new jeans. If we see a video of ourselves, are asked to talk about ourselves in an interview, or are required to give a presentation in our social psychology class, we experience an increased level of self-awareness and compare ourselves against a high standard which leads to reduced self-esteem since we realize we do not meet the standard. We then engage in motivated behavior to meet the standard, reassess whether we have, and then continue making adjustments until we finally meet the standard or give up and turn away from the self (Carver & Scheier, 1981). As you might expect, the process is aversive and so we want to resolve it (Flory et al., 2000). If we do not, we could experience depression (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987), engage in binge eating (Heatherton & Baumeister), and engage in counternormative behavior such as cheating (Diener & Wallbom, 1976) to name a few of the negative effects. Two recent studies found that when male participants were exposed to an intervention designed to focus their attention onto inhibitory, self-awareness cues, they engaged in significantly less alcohol-related physical aggression behaviors toward a female confederate compared to controls (Gallagher & Parrott, 2016) but for men with an internal and not an external locus of control (Purvis, Gallagher, & Parrott, 2016).

It is possible that some individuals are more self-focused than others, a distinction referred to as public vs. private self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975). Public self-consciousness refers to an individual who focuses on themselves as a social object and is concerned by how they appear to others. In contrast, private self-consciousness refers to an individual who focuses on the internal self, is introspective, and attends to one’s thoughts, feelings, and motives. Scheier, Buss, and Buss (1978) found that for those high in private self-consciousness, the correlation between aggressive behavior and self-report of aggressiveness was significantly higher than for those low in private self-consciousness or high or low public self-consciousness. Public self-consciousness has also been found to relate to social aspects of identity while private self-consciousness was related to personal aspects (Cheek & Briggs, 1982).

3.2.6. Self-Enhancement

Self-enhancement is a fundamental component of human nature and involves our tendency to see ourselves in a positive light. This often occurs after our self-esteem has been negatively affected in some way (Beauregard & Dunning, 1998).

According to Sedikides & Gregg (2008), self-enhancement can be done in one of several ways. First, we might self-advance or self-protect either by augmenting positivity or reducing the negativity of the self-concept. Second, self-enhancement can occur either publicly or privately whereby in the case of the former we engage in favorable self-presentation and the latter is an internal affair. Third, we tend to self-enhance in domains that matter most to us. Finally, self-enhancement is either candid or tactical, meaning “one can both seize an opportunity for overt and immediate self-advancement, or one can forgo it in favor of other activities liable to facilitate delayed self-enhancement” (pg. 104).

People can also engage in positive illusions (Taylor & Brown, 1988) in which they hold opinions of themselves that are exaggerated or falsely positive regarding abilities and skills. These positive illusions include inflating their perceptions of themselves (i.e. self-aggrandizement), believing they have more control over events than they do (i.e. exaggerated perceptions of control), and being overly optimistic about their future (i.e. unrealistic optimism). Positive illusions have been shown to lead to successful adjustment to stressful events (Taylor & Armor, 1996); increased satisfaction in close relationships when an individual idealized their partner and is in turn idealized by them (Barelds & Dijkstra, 2011; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996); and better outcomes for physical health later in life in terms of more satisfaction with leisure time, higher self-esteem, better perceived health, and less boredom proneness when retirees hold an exaggerated youthful bias (Gana, Alaphillippe, & Bailly, 2002). Positive illusions have been reported in parenting as well in which parents have a tendency to rate their own children as possessing more positive and less negative attributes than other children (Wenger & Fowers, 2008).

Have you ever worried about doing well on a test and so create an excuse to cover poor performance such as saying you were sick when you took it? If so, you engaged in behavioral self-handicapping (Jones & Berglas, 1978). We self-handicap when we are uncertain about our abilities and anticipate a threat to our self-esteem. Instead of saying we failed the exam because our ability was low or we did not study, we instead blame it on being sick or not sleeping well the night before. Self-handicapping can take two forms – behavioral and claimed. Behavioral self-handicapping occurs when we actively acquire an impediment such as drug or alcohol abuse (Arkin & Baumgardner, 1985) or do not have enough time to practice (Baumeister, Hamilton, & Tice, 1985). Claimed self-handicapping occurs when a person only reports obstacles to their success such as suffering from test anxiety (Smith, Snyder, and Handelsman, 1982) or being in a bad mood (Baumgarder, Lake, and Arkin, 1985). Between the two, behavioral handicaps are more convincingly tied to performance and so more credible, while claimed handicaps serve as an excuse for failure but do not necessarily decrease the person’s chance of success (Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005). Finally, Stewart & Walker (2014) found that self-handicapping was predicted by perfectionism and an external locus of control in a study of 79 university students (they also found that perfectionism predicted low self-efficacy).

We might even engage in the social comparison process to feel better about ourselves. How so? Instead of comparing our performance to others to see where we rate, we will look for someone we know performs worse than we do or is worse off than we are, and then make a downward social comparison (Wills, 1981). This makes us feel better about ourselves because no matter how bad off we are at the time, that person is in a far worse predicament. Maybe we know we are in a batting slump over the past 10 games and have experienced a reduction in our self-esteem as a result. We might compare ourselves against another teammate who has underperformed all year and realize that our situation is temporary and not seemingly permanent like theirs.

People have a tendency to evaluate themselves much higher than they evaluate others. For instance, they are smarter, better looking, more capable, and more honest than other people. This is called the “better than average” ( BTA) effect. Across five studies, Brown (2012) showed that the BTA is stronger for important attributes than ones that do not matter and when participants experienced a threat to their feelings of self-worth. It has also been shown that the effect holds for easy tasks which produce underconfidence, but not for difficult ones which lead to overconfidence and making a worse-than-average bias (Larrick, Burson, & Soll, 2007). Finally, Kanten and Teigen (2008) asked 385 students to rate themselves or an acquaintance relative to their peers on several personality traits. The results showed that participants saw themselves as superior to most others at all points in time. The authors describe a better than average improvement effect such that participants said they were more superior now compared to the past and expected to be even more superior in the future.

Finally, Cialdini et al. (1976) said that people have a tendency to publicly announce their associations with successful others in a process they called “ bask in reflected glory ” (BIRG). In a series of three field experiments involving 300 university students across seven universities in the United States, Cialdini et al. (1976) found that participants strived to bask in the glory of successful others even though they were not the cause of their  success, such as wearing school apparel and saying ‘we’ after their team was victorious but not when they lost (in the case of a loss, participants often said ‘they lost’ instead of ‘we lost’).  In another study, two days before the 1999 general election in Flanders researchers counted and recorded houses displaying at least one poster or one removable lawn sign supporting a political party (a total of 462 addresses for posters and 177 addresses for lawn signs). The day after the elections, the houses were checked to see if the poster or lawn sign (s) was/were still present. The results showed that the better the election result, the more houses that still displayed the sign/poster. Winners flaunted their association with the winning party, supporting BIRG while supporters of the losing party tried to conceal their association (Boen et al., 2002).

• Define self-presentation.
• Define self-promotion and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define ingratiation and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define false modesty and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define self-verification and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define self-monitoring and describe how it is used in self-presentation.

3.3.1. Self-Presentation Defined

Think about the last date you went on, especially a first date. What did you do beforehand? You likely showered and groomed yourself, maybe even rehearsed what you would say in the mirror. You also likely took great care to pick your clothes out to make a good first impression. Any strategies we use to make ourselves appear in a more positive light to others is called self-presentation. We intentionally try to control or shape their impressions of us (Schlenker, 2012). First impressions are especially important. Oftentimes, if we make a bad first impression it can be virtually impossible to overcome even if subsequent interactions are much more positive.

3.3.2. Specific Strategies Used in Self-Presentation

So that we can successfully shape the view others have of us to be positive, we need to engage in effortful behavior. How so? One strategy is to use self-promotion or engaging in behaviors or saying positive things about oneself. We often engage in this type of behavior on a first date or in an interview. Research has also shown that individuals higher in narcissism and lower in self-esteem engage in greater levels of online activity on social networking sites such as Facebook and use more self-promotional content to include About Me, Main Photo, View Photos, and status updates. The study also found gender differences insofar as males engaged in more self-promotion in the About Me and Notes sections while females displayed more self-promotional main photos (Mehdizadeh, 2010).

Another strategy is called ingratiation or complimenting, flattering, or engaging in other acts that lead a person to do things for you or like you. This is a typical strategy used by salespeople to have you engage in one clear behavior – buy a car or other product. Politicians are known to use the strategy also so that you come to like them while they are campaigning and then subsequently vote for them on election day. Cialdini (2007) writes in his book Influence: The Power of Persuasion , “Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor” (pg. 176).

Maybe you have been on a team at work before and had an idea that completely revolutionized the way your company completed a service for its clients. Did you gloat about your performance? Not likely. You were more likely to downplay your performance and talk about the contributions of your fellow teammates instead. The end result is that you will be seen as likeable and competent by others but for what is called false modesty , you must have been successful in your performance and others must know about it already (i.e. a fan was watching the big game and saw the wide receiver catch the game winning touchdown).

Another strategy is to choose situations or interpret behavior in ways that confirm already held beliefs or to avoid situations and criticism that might contradict these beliefs. Essentially, we want to confirm our existing self-concept but from the eyes of others. This behavior can best be described as self-verification .

Finally, we engage in self-monitoring or observing our own behavior so that we can make adjustments to produce the impression we desire in others and to meet the demands of the situation (Snyder, 1987). For instance, a literature review of self-monitoring through paper diaries, the internet, personal digital assistants, and digital scales in relation to weight loss, found that more frequent self-monitoring of diet, physical activity, or weight led to more successful outcomes for weight management (Burke, Wang, & Sevick, 2011).

• Define the self-serving bias.
• Describe how social desirability is a form of the self-serving bias.
• Contrast the false consensus and false uniqueness effects.
• Outline the benefits, and perils, of optimism and pessimism.

Our final section covers cognitive biases and heuristics used to increase our sense of self, though we have discussed others already throughout this module.

3.4.1. The Self-Serving Bias

First, the self-serving bias is our tendency to see ourselves in a favorable light. We take credit for our successes but blame failures on outside forces. This bias is often displayed by students who are quicker to explain a bad grade on a test as the instructor creating a test that was too difficult or testing on information not in the study guide. When the student does well, though, it is due to their skill and time spent studying, and not necessarily to the test being extra easy.

We even have a tendency to see ourselves as less likely to exhibit a self-serving bias than others (Friedrich, 1996; Myers, 1990). Friedrich (1996) documented this effect across two studies. First, 47 upper level undergraduates enrolled in either a statistics or industrial/organizational psychology course completed an anonymous survey at the beginning of class having them read a paragraph about the results of a SAT survey and then respond to a paragraph describing the self-serving bias. At the end they were asked, “How often do you think (you; the average person) make this kind of mistake when judging or evaluating (yourself; him- or herself)?” and indicated their answer on a 9-point scale (1 meaning almost never and 9 indicating nearly all the time). The results showed that students generally saw themselves as significantly less likely to distort their self-perceptions. In the second study, 38 introductory psychology students were lectured on research related to the self-serving bias during the last third of a regularly scheduled class. At the beginning of the next class they were given a questionnaire asking them to what degree they thought that they or the average person (depending on the condition they were in) would make the mistake. The same 9-point scale was used. Results of the second study were consistent with the first such that students believed others are more likely to commit the self-serving bias than they are.

Another way we see the self-serving bias play out in research is through the social desirability effect or when participants only provide information that appears to be what is expected by society or is desirable. If asked questions about sexual activity, some may report lower levels of activity than is true or not mention acts of sexual impropriety. Though our society has become sexually charged, there are still limits to what is acceptable. We will talk more about self-serving behavior when we discuss attribution theory in Module 4.

3.4.1.1. Explaining self-serving bias. So, what are potential causes of the self-serving bias? In a 2008 article, Shepperd, Malone, and Sweeny cite a few different classes of explanations. First, the previously discussed self-enhancement and self-presentation are offered as motivation-driven reasons (please see the previous sections for a discussion).

Second, they offer cognitive-driven explanations. The outcomes might be inconsistent with expectations such that our expectations are grounded in experience and we utilize cognitive mechanisms that might mute, dampen, or even erase previous negative experiences but not positive ones. Our outcomes may also not be consistent with our self-schema meaning that our views of our skills and abilities are often overly positive and that we view ourselves as the kind of person who produces positive outcomes, not negative ones. Positive outcomes are consistent with our self-schema while negative outcomes lead to two possible conclusions: the negative outcome had an internal cause and our positive self-schema is not correct, or the negative outcome had an external cause and our positive self-schema remains intact. A third possibility is that outcomes are inconsistent with actions . Positive expectations usually lead to goal-directed behavior. The authors offer the example of a boy who prepares to ask a girl out on a date by rehearsing what he will say, dressing nice, and acting charming. If she accepts his offer, he will see it as due to his efforts but if she rejects him, he will likely regroup and try again a few times. If the answer continues to be ‘no’ then he will believe the cause is not with him but something external.

A fourth cognitive explanation is called biased hypothesis-testing . When failure occurs in place of expected success, we are likely to ask ‘why did this happen?’ Like scientist’s, people form hypotheses to answer the question and then collect data to test it. But they are often not good scientists and engage in confirmation bias and see only information that confirms rather than disconfirms their hypothesis. People also find case-positive information more diagnostic than case-negative. Finally, people engage in different standards of proof in which they form a proposition or hypothesis and proceed to evaluate evidence. Unlike biased hypothesis-testing though, they consider all information and do not omit disconfirming evidence. How much information is needed to accept or reject their hypothesis also varies insofar as they require more information to accept an undesired hypothesis and less for a desired hypothesis.  For instance, the specific hypothesis tested (i.e. ‘Am I smart?’ or ‘Am I stupid?’) determines what information is sought out in biased hypothesis testing while in different standards of proof the exact hypothesis determines how much information is required to draw a conclusion (more proof for the question centered on whether they are stupid and less for if they are smart).

Shepperd, Malone, and Sweeny (2008) conclude that the self-serving bias can only be understood using both motivational and cognitive driven explanations.

3.4.2. Overestimating Our Opinions and Skills

People often overestimate to what degree their opinion is shared by others. This tendency is called the false consensus effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). It may occur because people are biased in viewing their own positions as what everyone else subscribes to as well, or because they overgeneralize from case information with their opinion serving as one salient type of case information (Alicke & Largo, 1995). The false consensus effect has been demonstrated in regard to smoking behavior (thinking that half or more than half of adults or peers smoked led to the most smoking involvement; Botvin et al., 1992); drug use (Wolfson, 2000); engaging in health protective or defeating behaviors (Suls, Wan, & Sanders, 1988); a willingness to escalate a disturbance (Russell & Arms, 1995); presidential preferences such that supporters of a candidate predicted a higher percentage of support for the candidate than other candidates (Brown, 1982); determining the extent to which other voters would vote like you (Koestner et al., 1995); and illicit drug use by elite athletes (Dunn, Thomas, Swift, & Burns, 2011).

Likewise, we tend to underestimate to what degree others share our abilities and skills. This tendency is called the false uniqueness effect . We might see our math ability as rare, our future to be brighter, or our opinion of a social matter to be more desirable. One study found that participants believed their first name to be unique, whether it was rare or common. The effect held for both male and female names and the researchers also found that when we consider making a name change, rare names are often considered (Kulig, 2013).

3.4.3. Optimism…to the Extreme

Of course, seeing the jar as half full and not half empty has obvious benefits for mental health. This is the essence of the difference between being optimistic and pessimistic.  Scheier and Carver (1985) offered a theory of dispositional optimism which defines it as, “a stable individual difference that reflects the general perception that future positive outcomes will be common and future negative outcomes will be rare” (Gallagher, Lopez, & Pressman, 2012). Research has shown that being optimistic results in higher levels of subjective well-being for college students (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009) and adults (Isaacowitz, 2005), leads to more adaptive coping mechanisms (Carver et al., 2009; Nes & Segerstrom, 2006), can bring about greater success on the job (Seligman & Schulman, 1986), results in goal attainment (Segerstrom & Nes, 2006), and brings about better physical health (Giltay et al., 2004).

Is optimism universal? Gallagher, Lopez, and Pressman (2012) conducted a study using representative samples from 142 countries numbering over 150,000 participants and found that individuals of all ages, races, education levels, and socioeconomic backgrounds and most countries are optimistic and that this optimism leads to better subjective well-being and health. Optimism is not merely a benefit of living in an industrialized nation either.

But is there such a thing as being too optimistic to the point of being unrealistic? The answer is yes and Weinstein (1980) identified a tendency people have to think they are invulnerable and that others will be the victims of misfortune but not themselves. He called this error in judgment, which results in a bias towards favorable outcomes, unrealistic optimism . For instance, college students in one study were unrealistically optimistic about the likelihood they would develop alcohol related problems in the future such as having a hangover, missing classes, or having an argument with a friend over their drinking. The negative consequences of unrealistic optimism were found to be both proximal and distal (Dillard, Midboe, & Klein, 2009). Another study found that patient’s participating in early-phase oncology trials display the unrealistic optimism bias in relation to their expectation of the therapeutic benefit of the trial and that this tendency can undermine the informed consent of participants (Jansen et al., 2011).

Everything is not always roses and so expressing some pessimism can actually help us to be realistic. Defensive pessimism can help us manage our anxiety and pursue our goals by setting low expectations and mentally exploring possible outcomes of goal-relevant tasks (Norem, 2008; Norem & Cantor, 1986). Hazlett, Molden, and Sackett (2011) found that participants who were focused on growth and advancement preferred optimistic forecasts and perform better when they express an optimistic outlook while those who were concerned with safety and security preferred pessimistic forecasts and perform better when they express a pessimistic outlook.

Module Recap

That’s it. We spent an entire module talking about our – self and should feel no guilt over it. Kidding. To be serious though, we all try and answer the question of who we are and philosophers have been tackling issues related to what it means to be human and matters of human existence since the dawn of time. Our discussion focused on the self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation, and biases and heuristics we make/use to protect our sense of self. We hope you enjoyed the wide array of issues we covered and with this topic out of the way, we can now continue our discussion in Part II of how we think about ourselves and others by focusing on ‘others.’ After this, we will round out Part II by discussing the attitudes we have about ourselves, others, and things in our world.

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Week 3: Intrapersonal Communication and Self

Self-presentation.

How we perceive ourselves manifests in how we present ourselves to others. Self-presentation is the process of strategically concealing or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions. [1] We engage in this process daily and for different reasons. Although people occasionally intentionally deceive others in the process of self-presentation, in general we try to make a good impression while still remaining authentic. Since self-presentation helps meet our instrumental, relational, and identity needs, we stand to lose quite a bit if we are caught intentionally misrepresenting ourselves. In May of 2012, Yahoo!’s CEO resigned after it became known that he stated on official documents that he had two college degrees when he actually only had one. In a similar incident, a woman who had long served as the dean of admissions for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology was dismissed from her position after it was learned that she had only attended one year of college and had falsely indicated she had a bachelor’s and master’s degree. [2] Such incidents clearly show that although people can get away with such false self-presentation for a while, the eventual consequences of being found out are dire. As communicators, we sometimes engage in more subtle forms of inauthentic self-presentation. For example, a person may state or imply that they know more about a subject or situation than they actually do in order to seem smart or “in the loop.” During a speech, a speaker works on a polished and competent delivery to distract from a lack of substantive content. These cases of strategic self-presentation may not ever be found out, but communicators should still avoid them as they do not live up to the standards of ethical communication.

Consciously and competently engaging in self-presentation can have benefits because we can provide others with a more positive and accurate picture of who we are. People who are skilled at impression management are typically more engaging and confident, which allows others to pick up on more cues from which to form impressions. [3] Being a skilled self-presenter draws on many of the practices used by competent communicators, including becoming a higher self-monitor. When self-presentation skills and self-monitoring skills combine, communicators can simultaneously monitor their own expressions, the reaction of others, and the situational and social context. [4] Sometimes people get help with their self-presentation. Although most people can’t afford or wouldn’t think of hiring an image consultant, some people have started generously donating their self-presentation expertise to help others. Many people who have been riding the tough job market for a year or more get discouraged and may consider giving up on their job search. Now a project called “Style Me Hired” has started offering free makeovers to jobless people in order to offer them new motivation and help them make favorable impressions and hopefully get a job offer. [5]

People who have been out of work for a while may have difficulty finding the motivation to engage in the self-presentation behaviors needed to form favorable impressions.

There are two main types of self-presentation: prosocial and self-serving. [6] Prosocial self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as a role model and make a person more likable and attractive. For example, a supervisor may call on her employees to uphold high standards for business ethics, model that behavior in her own actions, and compliment others when they exemplify those standards. Self-serving self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as highly skilled, willing to challenge others, and someone not to be messed with. For example, a supervisor may publicly take credit for the accomplishments of others or publicly critique an employee who failed to meet a particular standard. In summary, prosocial strategies are aimed at benefiting others, while self-serving strategies benefit the self at the expense of others.

In general, we strive to present a public image that matches up with our self-concept, but we can also use self-presentation strategies to enhance our self-concept. [7]   When we present ourselves in order to evoke a positive evaluative response, we are engaging in self-enhancement. In the pursuit of self-enhancement, a person might try to be as appealing as possible in a particular area or with a particular person to gain feedback that will enhance one’s self-esteem. For example, a singer might train and practice for weeks before singing in front of a well-respected vocal coach but not invest as much effort in preparing to sing in front of friends. Although positive feedback from friends is beneficial, positive feedback from an experienced singer could enhance a person’s self-concept. Self-enhancement can be productive and achieved competently, or it can be used inappropriately. Using self-enhancement behaviors just to gain the approval of others or out of self-centeredness may lead people to communicate in ways that are perceived as phony or overbearing and end up making an unfavorable impression. [8]

“Getting Plugged In”

Self-presentation online: social media, digital trails, and your reputation.

Although social networking has long been a way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, the advent of social media has made the process of making connections and those all-important first impressions much more complex. Just looking at Facebook as an example, we can clearly see that the very acts of constructing a profile, posting status updates, “liking” certain things, and sharing various information via Facebook features and apps is self-presentation. [9]   People also form impressions based on the number of friends we have and the photos and posts that other people tag us in. All this information floating around can be difficult to manage. So how do we manage the impressions we make digitally given that there is a permanent record?

Research shows that people overall engage in positive and honest self-presentation on Facebook. [10] Since people know how visible the information they post is, they may choose to only reveal things they think will form favorable impressions. But the mediated nature of Facebook also leads some people to disclose more personal information than they might otherwise in such a public or semipublic forum. These hyperpersonal disclosures run the risk of forming negative impressions based on who sees them. In general, the ease of digital communication, not just on Facebook, has presented new challenges for our self-control and information management. Sending someone a sexually provocative image used to take some effort before the age of digital cameras, but now “sexting” an explicit photo only takes a few seconds. So people who would have likely not engaged in such behavior before are more tempted to now, and it is the desire to present oneself as desirable or cool that leads people to send photos they may later regret. [11] In fact, new technology in the form of apps is trying to give people a little more control over the exchange of digital information. An iPhone app called “Snapchat” allows users to send photos that will only be visible for a few seconds. Although this isn’t a guaranteed safety net, the demand for such apps is increasing, which illustrates the point that we all now leave digital trails of information that can be useful in terms of our self-presentation but can also create new challenges in terms of managing the information floating around from which others may form impressions of us.

• What impressions do you want people to form of you based on the information they can see on your Facebook page?
• Have you ever used social media or the Internet to do “research” on a person? What things would you find favorable and unfavorable?
• Do you have any guidelines you follow regarding what information about yourself you will put online or not? If so, what are they? If not, why?
• Lauren J. Human et al., “Your Best Self Helps Reveal Your True Self: Positive Self-Presentation Leads to More Accurate Personality Impressions,” Social Psychological and Personality Sciences 3, no. 1 (2012): 23. ↵
• Lauren Webber and Melissa Korn, “Yahoo’s CEO among Many Notable Resume Flaps,” Wall Street Journal Blogs , May 7, 2012, accessed June 9, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/05/07/yahoos-ceo-among-many-notable-resume-flaps . ↵
• Lauren J. Human et al., “Your Best Self Helps Reveal Your True Self: Positive Self-Presentation Leads to More Accurate Personality Impressions,” Social Psychological and Personality Sciences 3, no. 1 (2012): 27. ↵
• John J. Sosik, Bruce J. Avolio, and Dong I. Jung, “Beneath the Mask: Examining the Relationship of Self-Presentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 217. ↵
• “Style Me Hired,” accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.stylemehired.com . ↵
• Owen Hargie, Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 99–100. ↵
• John J. Sosik, Bruce J. Avolio, and Dong I. Jung, “Beneath the Mask: Examining the Relationship of Self-Presentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 236. ↵
• Junghyun Kim and Jong-Eun Roselyn Lee, “The Facebook Paths to Happiness: Effects of the Number of Facebook Friends and Self-Presentation on Subjective Well-Being,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 14, no. 6 (2011): 360. ↵
• Natalie DiBlasio, “Demand for Photo-Erasing iPhone App Heats up Sexting Debate,” USA Today , May 7, 2012, accessed June 6, 2012, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/05/demand-for-photo-erasing-iphone-app-heats-up-sexting-debate/1 . ↵
• Perceiving and Presenting Self. Authored by : Anonymous. Provided by : Anonymous. Located at : http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/a-primer-on-communication-studies/s02-03-perceiving-and-presenting-self.html . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Image of man straightening tie. Authored by : Alex France. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/5UE1JQ . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Home Blog Presentation Ideas About Me Slides: How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation

About Me Slides: How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation

From conference talks to client demos, it’s always essential to include an About Me slide in any presentation you are giving. Introducing yourself early into the presentation helps build a better rapport with the audience.

You can start with several fun facts about me slide to break the ice or go for a more formal professional bio to explain your background and what makes you qualified to talk about the topic at hand. At any rate, your goal is to get the audience on your side by revealing some of your personality. 

How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation: 4 Approaches 

It’s a good practice to include self-introduction slides at the beginning of your presentation. If you are looking to answer how to introduce yourself professionally, typically somewhere after the title, opening slide , and the main agenda. However, the presentation structure will be somewhat different depending on whether you are presenting to a new audience or a group of people familiar with (e.g., your team, clients, or business partners). 

Here are four about me slide ideas you can try out, plus an About me template you can use to present yourself in a presentation. 

1. Mention Your Name and Affiliations

Start with the introduction basics. State your name, company, title/position, and several quick facts about who you are and what you do. Even if you present to a familiar audience, a brief recap is always welcome. 

To keep things a bit more engaging, consider adding some lesser-known facts about yourself. For example:

• Your interests 
• Recent accomplishments
• Testimonial/quote from a team member 
• Fun nicknames you got 

The above can be nice ice breakers for less formal team presentations, project updates, or catch-ups with clients. 

Here are several unique About Me examples you can try out:

For a client case study presentation : 

“Hi, I’m Lynda, Chief Customer Success Specialist with Acme Corp. (Also, someone you thought was a chatbot for the first few encounters)

47 NPS | 15% Churn Rate | 40% repeat purchase rate”

For a team after-action review presentation :

Mike, Project Manager at Cool Project

(aka Maximizer)

Personal Project stats:

387 Slack messages answered

56 cups of coffee consumed

Project profit gross margin: $1.2 million 

2. Work On Your Elevator Pitch 

One of the best ways to introduce yourself in a presentation is to share a punchy elevator pitch. This works extra well if you are presenting to a new audience. 

An elevator pitch is a concise statement (1-2 sentences) that summarizes your unique strengths, skills, and abilities and explains how these can benefit your listener. 

It’s nice to have one ready for your presentations and networking in general since it helps you immediately connect with new people and communicate your value. 

Writing a solid elevator pitch may require several attempts and iterations. But the sooner you start — the faster you’ll arrive at the best formula! 

To get your creative juices flowing, here are several elevator pitch ideas you can incorporate in an introduction slide about yourself. 

For professionals: 

“Certified Salesforce Administrator, data visualization specialist, and analytics for top SaaS brands. I help businesses make more sense of their data to drive better outcomes”.

For a mentor :

“Adjunct professor of creative writing at Columbia University, published author, former lifestyle editor at Esquire, the New York Times. I can teach you how to find, shape, pitch, and publish stories for web & print.”

For a student: 

“Third-year Marine Biology student at Denver State Uni. Volunteer at Lake Life Protection NGO, climate change activist, looking to expand my research about water conservation”.

3. Answer Popular Questions or Assumptions 

If you are a frequent presenter , chances are you get asked a lot of the same “About Me questions” after your speeches and during the networking bits. So why not address a roaster of these in your About Me slide? Select 4-5 most common questions and list them as quick FAQs on your slide deck. 

4. Focus on Telling a Story 

Strong introductions are personable. They are meant to offer a sneak-peak into your personality and the passion behind your work. That’s why for less formal presentations, you can (and should!) start with a short personal story. 

Remember: reliability is important to “click” with your audience. 

For instance, neuroscience research of political ads recently found that ads featuring real people performed better than those with genetic stock footage. Among viewers, emotional engagement and memory encoding (recall) increased dramatically when political ads showed relatable people. 

The same holds true for commerce. In 2015, GE launched a viral “What’s the Matter With Owen?” video ad series to attract more young talent to the company. The clips featured a relatable protagonist, struggling to explain what his work at GE entails e.g. that the company isn’t building railroads, but actually does some very innovative pilots. Many engineers related to the promo and work applications to GE shoot up by 800% ! 

As the above examples show, a good relatable story can go a long way. So think about how you can make a PowerPoint presentation about yourself more representative of who you really are as a person. 

How to Give a Presentation About Yourself: 4 Fool-Proof Tips

On other occasions, you may be asked to give a full-length “about me” presentation. Typically, this is the case during a second interview, onboarding , or if you are in attending a training program or workshop where everyone needs to present themselves and their work. 

Obviously, you’ll need more than one good about me slide in this case. So here’s how to prepare a superb presentation about me. 

What to Put in a Presentation About Yourself?

The audience will expect to learn a mix of personal and professional facts about you. Thus, it’s a good idea to include the following information: 

• Your name, contact info, website , social media handles, digital portfolio .
• Short bio or some interesting snippets. 
• Career timeline (if applicable).
• Main achievements (preferably quantifiable).
• Education, special training.
• Digital badging awards , accolades, and other types of recognition.
• Something more personal — an interest, hobby, aspiration. 

The above mix of items will change a bit, depending on whether you are giving an interview presentation about yourself or introduce yourself post-hiring. For example, in some cases a dedicated bio slide may be useful, but other times focusing on main achievements and goals can be better.

That being said, let’s take a closer look at how to organize the above information in a memorable presentation. 

P.S. Grab an about me slide template to make the design process easier! 

1. Create a List of “Facts About Me”

The easiest way to answer the “tell me about yourself” question is by having an array of facts you can easily fetch from your brain. 

When it comes to a full-length about me presentation , it’s best to have a longer list ready. To keep your brainstorming process productive, organize all your ideas in the following buckets: 

• Key skills (soft and hard)
• Educational accolades, training
• Accomplishments and other “bragging rights”
• Personal tidbits (a.k.a. fun facts ) 

Once you have a list, it gets easier to build a series of slides around it. 

2. Think Like Your Audience 

Most likely you’d be asked to make a presentation about yourself by a recruiter. There’s a good reason why many ask this — they want to determine if you are a good “cultural fit” for their organization. 

After all, 33% of people quit within the first 3 months of accepting a new job. Among these:

• 43% of employees quit because their day-to-day role was different than what they were told it would be during the hiring process.
• 32% cite company culture as a factor for leaving within the first three months. 

About me presentations often serve as an extra “filter” helping both parties ensure that they are on the same page expectations- and work style-wise. Thus, when you prepare your slide deck, do some background company research. Then try to align the presentation with it by matching the company tone, communication style, and cultural values. 

3. Include Testimonials and Recommendations

Use the voice of others to back up the claims you are making in your presentation. After all, trumping your own horn is what you are expected to do in such a presentation. But the voices of others can strengthen the claims you are personally making. 

Depending on your role and industry, try to sprinkle some of the following testimonials: 

• LinkedIn recommendations
• Quotes from personal or professional references
• Social media comments 
• Data metrics of your performance
• Funny assessments from your colleagues/friends 

The above not just strengthen your narrative, but also help the audience learn some extras about you and your background. Testimonial slides can be of help for this purpose.

4. Include a Case Study 

One of the best ways to illustrate who you are is to show what you are best in. Remember, an about me presentation often needs to “soft sell” your qualifications, experience, and personality. 

One of the best ways to do that is to showcase how you can feel in a specific need and solve issues the business is facing. 

So if you have the timeframe, use some of the ending slides to deliver a quick case study. You can present: 

• Short retrospective of a past successful project
• Before-after transformations you’ve achieved 
• Spotlight of the main accomplishments within the previous role 
• Main customer results obtained
• Specific solution delivered by you (or the team you’ve worked with) 

Ending your presentation on such a high note will leave the audience positively impressed and wondering what results you could achieve for them.

To Conclude 

It’s easy to feel stumped when you are asked to talk about yourself. Because there are so many things you could mention (but not necessarily should). At the same time, you don’t want to make your introduction sound like a bragging context. So always think from the position of your audience. Do the facts you choose to share benefit them in any way? If yes, place them confidently on your About Me slides! 

1. Personal Self Introduction PowerPoint Template

Use This Template

2. Self Introduction PowerPoint Template

3. Meet the Team PowerPoint Template Slides

4. Introduce Company Profile PowerPoint Template

5. Modern 1-Page Resume Template for PowerPoint

6. Modern Resume Presentation Template

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How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation [with Examples]

In this post, we are going to cover the best way, a very simple three-step process that will help you introduce yourself in a presentation. A summary of the steps is below.

• Start with your name and company (or organization or school).
• Tell your audience what problem you can solve for them.
• Share some type of proof (social proof works best) that you can solve this problem.

I will break down each step into a simple-to-follow process. But first… a little background.

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First, Identify What Your Audience Wants from Your Presentation

So, before you design your introduction, think about what your audience wants from your presentation. Why do they want to spend their valuable time listening to you? Are going to waste their time? Or, are you going to provide them with something valuable?

For instance, I have expertise in a number of different areas. I’m a public speaking coach, a keynote speaker, a best-selling author, a search engine optimization specialist, and a popular podcaster. However, if I delivered that sentence to any audience, the most likely reaction would be, “So what?” That sentence doesn’t answer any of the above questions. The statement is also really “me-focused” not “audience-focused.”

So, when I start to design my self-introduction, I want to focus just on the area of expertise related to my topic. I’m then going to answer the questions above about that particular topic. Once you have these answers, set them aside for a second. They will be important later.

How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation in Class.

Instead, you probably want to add in a fun way to start a speech . For example, instead of introducing yourself in your class speech and starting in an awkward way, start with a startling statistic. Or start with a summary of your conclusion. Or, you could start the presentation with an inspirational quote.

Each of these presentation starters will help you lower your nervousness and decrease your awkwardness.

If you are delivering a speech in a speech competition or to an audience who doesn’t know you try this technique. Just introduce yourself by saying your name , the school you represent , and your topic . Make it easy. This way you get to your content more quickly and lower your nervousness.

Typically, after you get the first few sentences out of the way, your nervousness will drop dramatically. Since your name, school, and topic should be very easy to remember, this takes the pressure off you during the most nervous moments.

Obviously, follow the guidelines that your teacher or coach gives you. (The competition may have specific ways they want you to introduce yourself.)

How to Introduce Yourself in a Business Presentation — A Step-by-Step Guide.

In a professional setting, when new people walk into a meeting and don’t know what to expect, they will feel uncomfortable. The easiest way to ease some of that tension is to chat with your audience as they come into the room.

By the way, if you are looking for a template for an Elevator Speech , make sure to click this link.

Step #1: Start with your name and company name (or organization).

This one is easy. Just tell your audience your name and the organization that you are representing. If your organization is not a well-known brand name, you might add a short clarifying description. For instance, most people outside of the training industry have never heard of The Leader’s Institute ®. So, my step #1 might sound something like…

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company…

Still short and sweet, but a little more clear to someone who has never heard of my company.

Should you give your job title? Well… Maybe and sometimes. Add your title into the introduction only if your title adds to your credibility.

For example, if you are delivering a financial presentation and you are the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of your company, you might mention that. Your title adds to your credibility. However, if the CFO is delivering a presentation about the value of joining a trade association, the CFO title adds little credibility. So, there is very little value in adding the title.

Step #2: Tell your audience what problem you can solve for them.

For instance, if my topic is how to deliver presentations, I have to determine why the audience would care. What problem will they have that I can help them with? For my audiences, the problem that I most often help people with is how to eliminate public speaking fear. Once I have the problem, I add that to my introduction by using the words, “I help people…”

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear.

However, if my topic is How to Close a Higher Percentage of Sales Presentations , I’d likely want to alter my introduction a little. I might say something like…

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people design more persuasive sales presentations.

I have expertise in both areas. However, I focus my introduction on just the expertise that is applicable to this audience. If I gave the first introduction to the second audience, they will likely respond by thinking, well, I don’t really get nervous speaking, so I guess I can tune out of this speech .

So, create a problem statement starting with, “I help people…” Make the statement apply to what your audience really wants.

Step #3: Share some type of proof (social proof works best) that you can solve this problem.

By the way, if you just do steps #1 and #2, your introduction will be better than most that you will hear. However, if you add Step #3, you will gain more respect (and attention) from your audience. Without adding some type of proof that you can solve this problem, you are just giving your opinion that you are an expert. However, if you can prove it, you are also proving that you are an expert.

This is the tricky part. For some reason, most people who get to this part feel like they haven’t accomplished great things, so they diminish the great accomplishments that they do have.

For instance, an easy way to offer proof is with a personal story of how you have solved that problem in the past.

A Few Examples of How to Introduce Yourself Before a Presentation.

For instance, one of my early clients was a young accountant. When I was working with him, he came up with the following introduction, “I’m Gary Gorman with Gorman and Associates CPA’s, and I help small businesses avoid IRS audits.” It was a great, audience-focused attention-getter. (No one wants to get audited.) However, as an accountant, it wasn’t like his company was getting a lot of five-star reviews on Yelp! So, he was kind of struggling with his social proof. So, I asked him a series of questions.

Me, “How many clients do you have?”

Gary, “Over 300.”

Me, “How many small business tax returns have you processed?”

Gary, “Well, at least a couple hundred a year for 15 years.”

Me, “So, at least 3000?” He nodded. “How many of your 300 clients have been audited since you have been representing them?”

He looked at me and said, “Well, none.”

So, we just added that piece of proof to his talk of introduction.

I’m Gary Gorman with Gorman and Associates CPA’s, and I help small businesses avoid IRS audits. In fact, in my career, I’ve helped clients complete over 3000 tax returns, and not a single one has ever been audited.

Here Is How I Adjust My Introduction Based on What I Want the Audience to Do.

For my proof, I have a number of options. Just like Gary, I have had a lot of clients who have had great successes. In addition, I have published two best-selling books about public speaking. I also have hundreds of thousands of people who listen to my podcast each week. So, I can pick my evidence based on what I want my audience to do.

For instance, if I’m speaking at a convention, and I want the audience to come by my booth to purchase my books, my introduction might sound like this.

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear. One of the things that I’m most know for is being the author of two best-selling books, Fearless Presentations and Mastering Presentations.

However, if I’m leading a webinar, I may want the audience to purchase a seat in one of my classes. In that case, my introduction might sound like this.

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear. For instance, for the last 20 years, I’ve taught public speaking classes to over 20,000 people, and I haven’t had a single person fail to reduce their nervousness significantly in just two days.

If my goal is to get the audience to subscribe to my podcast, my intro might sound like…

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear. One of the ways that I do this is with my weekly podcast called, Fearless Presentations, which has over one million downloads, so far.

Use the Form Below to Organize How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation.

The point is that you want to design your introduction in a way that makes people pause and think, “Really? That sounds pretty good.” You want to avoid introductions that make your audience think, “So what?”

If you have a speech coming up and need a good introduction, complete the form below. We will send you your answers via email!

Can You Replace Your Introduction with a PowerPoint Slide?

Is it okay to make your first slide (or second slide) in your presentation slides an introduction? Sure. A good public speaker will often add an introduction slide with a biography, portrait, and maybe even contact information. I sometimes do this myself.

However, I NEVER read the slide to my audience. I often just have it showing while I deliver the short introduction using the guide above. This is a great way to share more of your work experience without sounding like you are bragging.

For tips about how many powerpoint slides to use in a presentation , click here.

Remember that There Is a Big Difference Between Your Introduction in a Presentation and Your Presentation Starter.

When you introduce yourself in a presentation, you will often just use a single sentence to tell the audience who you are. You only use this intro if the audience doesn’t know who you are. Your presentation starter, though, is quite different. Your presentation starter should be a brief introduction with relevant details about what you will cover in your presentation.

For details, see Great Ways to Start a Presentation . In that post, we show ways to get the attention of the audience. We also give examples of how to use an interesting hook, personal stories, and how to use humor to start a presentation.

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View More Posts By Category: Free Public Speaking Tips | leadership tips | Online Courses | Past Fearless Presentations ® Classes | Podcasts | presentation skills | Uncategorized

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Measuring Dimensions of Self-Presentation in Twitter Bios and their Links to Misinformation Sharing

Social media platforms provide users with a profile description field, commonly known as a “bio,” where they can present themselves to the world. A growing literature shows that text in these bios can improve our understanding of online self-presentation and behavior, but existing work relies exclusively on keyword-based approaches to do so. We here propose and evaluate a suite of simple, effective, and theoretically motivated approaches to embed bios in spaces that capture salient dimensions of social meaning, such as age and partisanship. We evaluate our methods on four tasks, showing that the strongest one out-performs several practical baselines. We then show the utility of our method in helping understand associations between self-presentation and the sharing of URLs from low-quality news sites on Twitter , with a particular focus on explore the interactions between age and partisanship, and exploring the effects of self-presentations of religiosity . Our work provides new tools to help computational social scientists make use of information in bios, and provides new insights into how misinformation sharing may be perceived on Twitter.

Introduction

On social media sites like Tumblr (Yoder et al. 2020 ) , Twitter (Li et al. 2020 ; Rogers and Jones 2021 ; Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ) , TikTok (Darvin 2022 ) , and Parler (Bär, Pröllochs, and Feuerriegel 2023a ) , the profile description field (or bio ) asks users to describe themselves in a single text box. Users commonly do so with a combination of delimited phrases, each of which can range from unigrams like “Republican” to more complex expressions like “2020 Election Truth Seeker” (Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ) .

In most social settings, people aim to present to others only a single social identity (MacKinnon and Heise 2010 ; Schröder, Hoey, and Rogers 2016 ) . Examples of identities include social roles, like “doctor” and “mother”, group memberships like “Democrat” and “Yankees fan”, and social categories like “black people” and “women” (Tajfel and Turner 1979 ) . Bios thus present a unique setting where we can observe individuals explicitly labeling themselves with multiple social identities (Marwick and boyd 2011 ) . 1 1 1 Bios really express phrases that signal identity , what Pathak, Madani, and Joseph ( 2021 ) call personal identifiers . Here, we retain the phrase (social) identity as a familiar and concise shorthand. With respect to the language of self-presentation (Johnstone 1996 ) , bios are therefore an important tool for social scientists for three reasons.

First, bios provide insight into patterns of shared identity. For example, bios have been used to show that people who label themselves coffee snobs tend to be the same that label themselves marketing gurus (Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ) . They have also been used to better understand the increasing entanglement of partisanship and culture in social identities in the United States (Essig and DellaPosta 2024 ; Phillips, Carley, and Joseph 2024 ) . Second, bios allow us to study links between the identities people select for themselves and behavior. Users’ choices on how to label themselves can be linked to, for example, decisions on who chooses to re-blog whom on Tumblr (Yoder et al. 2020 ) , or how people respond to marketing campaigns (Ng and Cruickshank 2023 ) . Finally, bios can help us identify people who share a certain characteristic. To this end, p rior work has also explored how bios can help identify individuals such as Qanon supporters (Bär, Pröllochs, and Feuerriegel 2023a ) and journalists (Zeng et al. 2019 ) , characterize the demographics associated with the self-presentation of particular identities (Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ) , and even reflect current social movements (Rogers and Jones 2021 ; Hare and Jones 2023 ) .

Existing quantitative work on bios has, however, has focused almost exclusively on characterizing bios via the presence of particular phrases, whether through dictionary-based methods ( Rogers and Jones 2021 ; Zeng et al. 2019 ; Bär, Pröllochs, and Feuerriegel 2023b ) or through analysis of patterns in phrases extracted with regular expressions ( Yoder et al. 2020 ; Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ; Essig and DellaPosta 2024 ; Ng and Cruickshank 2023 ) . While findings from these approaches can be illuminating, they also make it difficult to study how bios align with particular dimensions of importance to social scientists, such as partisanship (Kozlowski, Taddy, and Evans 2019 ) . Acknowledging these challenges and opportunties, Jiang, Ren, and Ferrara ( 2023 ) develop an approach that uses modern NLP methods to infer ideological leanings implied by bios. However, their work focuses only on learning political ideology and also requires data beyond the bio itself to perform estimation. There thus exists a need for a method that can help us to measure self-presentation in bios in ways that 1) let us move beyond keyword-based methods and 2) beyond political ideology, 3) without requiring additional data.

To this end, the goals of this paper are two-fold. The first goal of the present work is to develop and evaluate three methods to project English-language social media bios onto multiple dimensions of social meaning, without retraining a new embedding model for each new desired dimension . Our methods are technically straightforward, in that we extend existing work on how to scale text along dimensions of meaning like gender and race using projections of text embeddings (Wilkerson and Casas 2017 ) . However, we build on this work by developing approaches specifically for the study of social media bios. Our models are grounded in the relevant social science , in that each method we present draws on social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979 ) to learn bio embeddings by making use of the fact that many bios consist of multiple, clearly delimited social identities (Marwick and boyd 2011 ; Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ) . As such, unlike in standard embedding models where we aim to embed words that mean the same thing closely together, our models aim to create embedding spaces (and projections of them) where phrases that are applied to the same people are close together in embedding space.

After describing our three approaches, we present an extensive validation across four tasks: 1) predicting which identities will appear in the same bio, 2) how projections of embeddings for specific identities within bios onto dimensions of age, gender, and partisanship correlate with human judgements, 3) whether projections using the embeddings of entire bios also correlate with human judgements, and 4) whether projections using the embeddings of entire bios correlate with other measures of user ideology, and show similar associations to behavior . Across all evaluation tasks, we find that the most effective model is an SBERT (Reimers and Gurevych 2019 ) model fine-tuned on bios . In Evaluation 1), we show that this model is best able to make predictions about identities the model has not seen, emphasizing its ability to generalize to new and unseen identities. Evaluations 2) and 3) show that this model effectively captures perceptions of how individuals present themselves, which is critical for understanding how other users interpret a particular bio (Heise 1987 ; Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ) . Finally, while our focus is on what is implied to others when a user self-presents, rather than inferring some “truth” about a user , we show that estimates of user ideology by our method correlate with other known approaches for doing so. Moreover, we show that associations with behavioral patterns (of misinformation sharing) using our method are consistent with other approaches.

Having identified a single model to embed bios, we continue to the second goal of our work, which is to explore associations between self-presentation in bios and the rate of low- (relative to high-) quality news shares on Twitter . Specifically, we focus on two research questions that have not been addressed in the existing literature. First, perhaps the most well-established finding in this literature is that misinformation sharing is more prevalent among older, right-leaning individuals (Grinberg et al. 2019 ; Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019 ; Brashier and Schacter 2020 ; Osmundsen et al. 2021 ; Nikolov, Flammini, and Menczer 2021 ) . However, due in part to sample size restrictions, existing work has theorized (Grinberg et al. 2019 ) but not tested empirically the existence of an interaction between age and partisanship. In the present work, using two different large datasets of Twitter users, we indeed show for the first time that such an interaction effect exists between self-presentation of age and partisanship, in that self-presenting as older and Republican has a multiplicative association with misinformation sharing. Second, while scholars have suggested that religiosity is a critical dimensions of the self associated with misinformation sharing online, no empirical work has addressed this point (Druckman et al. 2021 ) . To this end, we present 1) new and convincing evidence that on average, presenting as more religious is strongly associated with misinformation sharing.

In sum, the present work provides three contributions:

We propose, evaluate, and make public 2 2 2 The model is publicly available for use on https://github.com/navidmdn/identity˙embedding . a simple, effective, and theoretically motivated tool to embed English-language bios in socially meaningful latent spaces.

We show that our method 1) can be used to project both individual social identities and entire social media bios onto salient dimensions of social meaning, such as partisanship, gender, and age in ways that correlate with human judgements in two new survey datasets, and 2) correlates well with other measures of user ideology .

We use our model to extend our understanding of the relationship between how active news-sharing accounts on Twitter self-present and the proportion of news they share coming from low-quality news sites, particularly with respect to interactions between age and partisanship, and with respect to religiosity .

Measuring text on social dimensions of meaning

Social psychologists have developed a host of survey-based methods to measure associations between social identities and dimensions of social meaning. This estimation of identities on such dimensions is a core focus of social psychologists (Schröder, Hoey, and Rogers 2016 ; Fiske et al. 2002 ) , because connecting self-presentation along specific dimensions of social relevance to social behavior is important for developing and testing new theories (MacKinnon and Heise 2010 ) . Below, we leverage these established approaches to evaluate our methodology. However, survey data do not scale to the myriad ways people identify themselves (MacKinnon and Heise 2010 ) , are usually too small to capture differences across subgroups or contexts (Smith-Lovin and Douglas 1992 ) , and struggle to account for linguistically complex identities or situations where multiple identities are applied (Joseph and Morgan 2021 ) .

Most of the computational tools developed to address these challenges function by projecting embeddings from distributional semantic models ( DSM ), such as BERT, onto particular dimensions of meaning. The present work is most aligned with efforts that use contextualized embeddings (e.g. Kurita et al. 2019 ; Lucy, Tadimeti, and Bamman 2022 ; Field, Bhat, and Tsvetkov 2019 ) to do so. However, we expand on these methods in that we aim to focus not on linguistic similarity , but rather similarity in the types of people who use particular identities . More specifically, DSMs are based on the assumption that contextual similarity—similarity in where phrases appear in text—is a strong proxy for semantic similarity (roughly, synonomy). The idea behind this assumption is that phrases with high semantic similarity should have similar cognitive associations to other phrases, and thus high contextual similarity too (Miller and Charles 1991 ) . While deeply intertwined (Caliskan and Lewis 2020 ) , these linguistic associations and the socio-cultural associations of interest to us differ. Linguistic associations represent phrases with similar associations to similar other phrases ; what we desire are phrases with similar associations to similar kinds of people . While methodologically consistent with prior work, then, our work extends the existing literature by defining a different socio-theoretic goal that is consistent with the existing literature on self-presentation. We also provide several new evaluation datasets for future work.

In focusing on sets of identities applied to individuals, our work also relates to entity-centric text analysis (Field and Tsvetkov 2019 ) . Entity-centric work focuses on using phrases with known meanings (e.g. from surveys) to understand the portrayal of individuals (Antoniak, Mimno, and Levy 2019 ; Mendelsohn, Tsvetkov, and Jurafsky 2020 ) . Our method builds on a complementary idea, namely that we can use the fact that all identities in a bio refer to a single entity (a user) to create better embeddings. Similar in this vein is the work of Bamman and Smith ( 2014 ) , who use this idea to infer character personas in literature. The present work compliments these efforts by using entity-centric data to produce embeddings, rather than phrase clusters.

Our work also ties to the literature that explores the language associated with how people express misinformation (Mu and Aletras 2020 ; Shu et al. 2017 ; Rashkin et al. 2017 ) . More specifically, we complement these efforts to study how people express specific instances of misinformation by exploring how people who tend to spread misinformation present themselves via particular (sets of) social identities.

The Demographics (and Self-presentations) of Misinformation Sharing

The study of misinformation online has exploded in recent years (Lazer et al. 2018 ) . Within this literature, several papers have looked at associations between demographics and rates of misinformation sharing. Typically, they do so by gathering demographics either via survey (e.g. Grinberg et al. 2019 ) or using voter records (Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019 ; Mosleh, Pennycook, and Rand 2020 ) , and then associating contained demographic information with rates of misinformation sharing. Across studies, however, prior work has repeatedly found that the best predictors of misinformation exposure and sharing online are 1) old age (Brashier and Schacter 2020 ) , 2) alignment with the political right (Osmundsen et al. 2021 ; Nikolov, Flammini, and Menczer 2021 ) , and 3) overall levels of online activity (Grinberg et al. 2019 ) .

Our work compliments these existing efforts in a number of ways. First, these prior works tend to use small-N samples of misinformation sharers because of the challenges and biases associated with their recruitment methods (Hughes et al. 2021 ) . For example, Grinberg et al. ( 2019 ) and Guess, Nagler, and Tucker ( 2019 ) , analyze sharing patterns in settings where only 400 Twitter users and 101 Facebook users shared any misinformation, respectively. In contrast, we analyze two different and much larger datasets; in the larger one, 77,190 accounts share at least one low-quality news link.

Second, we focus here on demographics conveyed through self-presentation . These self-presented demographics are important in their own right for understanding who other Twitter users perceive to be sharing misinformation, perceptions that do not always align with a user’s “true demographics” (Nguyen et al. 2014 ) . Critically, then, we do not claim that our method infers demographics of users, nor do we believe it does so. Indeed, these self-presentations may vary from demographics in at least two ways. First, individuals may consciously choose not to convey certain demographic information online, such as gender (Buss, Le, and Haimson 2022 ) , and more generally choose which dimensions of the self are most important to present to their Twitter audience (Marwick and boyd 2011 ) . Second, non-human accounts, such as those run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), may fabricate self-presentations to shape online discussion (Zhang et al. 2021 ) . Prior studies that link users to surveys or voter records rule out these latter accounts in their sampling approach. In contrast, we aim to focus on which dimensions of social meaning are salient, or cast as salient, by those sharing misinformation unknowingly or for manipulation. We thus study here how the misinformation shares present their identity .

These two distinctions shape the two novel research questions we study here. First, the larger size of our dataset lets us explore interactions between self-presentations of age and partisanship, as compared to prior work which analyzes only the main effects. Second, our focus on dimensions of self-presentation instead of traditional demographics lets us analyze a novel, although well-theorized (Druckman et al. 2021 ) , empirical question: how is (self-presented) religiosity associated with misinformation sharing?

Methods for Embedding Twitter Bios

We propose three models that leverage existing methods to project phrases onto dimensions of social meaning in different ways. Our first model uses data only from bios, whereas the latter two use fine-tuning to balance between meanings in bios and semantic information in large, pre-trained DSMs. In all cases, our models are trained by using patterns in the multiple identities that appear in many social media bios. Because of this, it is useful to introduce some limited notation. First, let X 𝑋 X italic_X denote a dataset of bios where identities have been extracted, e.g. by using a regular expression (Yoder et al. 2020 ; Pathak, Madani, and Joseph 2021 ) . We assume X i = { x 1 i , x 2 i , … , x k i } superscript 𝑋 𝑖 subscript superscript 𝑥 𝑖 1 subscript superscript 𝑥 𝑖 2 … subscript superscript 𝑥 𝑖 𝑘 X^{i}=\{x^{i}_{1},x^{i}_{2},...,x^{i}_{k}\} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT = { italic_x start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 1 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_x start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 2 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , … , italic_x start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_k end_POSTSUBSCRIPT } represents a set of k 𝑘 k italic_k identities extracted from a single bio, and that V 𝑉 V italic_V is a vocabulary of all unique identities in the training portion of X 𝑋 X italic_X .

Bio-only model

Our Bio-only model is constructed by applying word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013 ) to X 𝑋 X italic_X . In common terminology for word2vec , we treat identities as words and bios as a context. Our intuition is that if the word2vec model can leverage contextual similarity on the “word-to-linguistic context” matrix to identify words with shared semantic meanings, it may also be useful to leverage the “identity-to-person context” matrix to identify phrases with shared socio-cultural meanings. We use word2vec models with an embedding size of 768 to match the embedding size of the other models used below, and train for 300 epochs with a window size of 8 (only .01% of bios in our training data contain more than 8 identities). Additional minor details are provided in the appendix.

Fine-tuned BERT

To fine-tune BERT, we use a masked language modeling (MLM) objective, randomly masking one of the identities in each bio. To prepare our dataset for training, we take each of the instances X i superscript 𝑋 𝑖 X^{i} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT and concatenate the phrases in it to form a full sentence. We then mask one of the identities and fine-tune a BERT-base model for 5 epochs while monitoring 10% of the training set as validation data. We used a learning rate of 2e-5 with a batch size of 64. Model training took approximately one day using a single A100 GPU. When bios are shorter than the context window size, padding is added; attention masking is used to ensure padding does not impact the embedding. We keep the embedding size of the BERT model at the default 768.

Fine-tuned SBERT

Finally, we construct a final model by fine-tuning Sentence-BERT (Reimers and Gurevych 2019 ) . Sentence-BERT uses contrastive learning , where the learning setup must be carefully constructed (Schroff, Kalenichenko, and Philbin 2015 ) . We develop an intuitive but effective approach here based on shared identities. In a contrastive learning framework, each data point is a triplet consisting of an anchor , a positive , and a negative sample. Our goal is to reshape the embedding space through fine-tuning such that for each triplet, the distance between anchor and positive samples, which co-occur within a bio in our setup, is minimized while the distance between anchor and negative samples, which do not, is maximized. As above, padding and attention masks are used when bios are shorter than the size of the context window. The embedding size of our selected sentence BERT model is 768 which matches the embedding size of all other proposed approaches for fair comparison.

We can frame this contrastive learning problem as a regression task: given a triplet of anchor ( X a subscript 𝑋 𝑎 X_{a} italic_X start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_a end_POSTSUBSCRIPT ), positive ( X p subscript 𝑋 𝑝 X_{p} italic_X start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_p end_POSTSUBSCRIPT ) and negative ( X n subscript 𝑋 𝑛 X_{n} italic_X start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT ) samples and a similarity measure (here, cosine), our objective is for c ⁢ s ⁢ ( X a , X p ) = 1.0 𝑐 𝑠 subscript 𝑋 𝑎 subscript 𝑋 𝑝 1.0 cs(X_{a},X_{p})=1.0 italic_c italic_s ( italic_X start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_a end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_X start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_p end_POSTSUBSCRIPT ) = 1.0 and c ⁢ s ⁢ ( X a , X n ) = 0.0 𝑐 𝑠 subscript 𝑋 𝑎 subscript 𝑋 𝑛 0.0 cs(X_{a},X_{n})=0.0 italic_c italic_s ( italic_X start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_a end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_X start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT ) = 0.0 for all training points, where c ⁢ s 𝑐 𝑠 cs italic_c italic_s stands for cosine similarity. We can then optimize this objective using mean squared error. The challenge is to construct an effective set of triplets to train on. To do so, we first take a bio X i superscript 𝑋 𝑖 X^{i} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT from the training set, and then randomly select an identity from X i superscript 𝑋 𝑖 X^{i} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT to be the positive sample. We name the remaining identities in X i superscript 𝑋 𝑖 X^{i} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT the anchor sample. Finally, we randomly select an identity that never co-occurs with the positive sample as the negative sample. As an example, from the bio [assistant professor, Bernie supporter, #blacklivesmatter] we set assistant professor, #blacklivesmatter as the anchor sample, Bernie supporter as the positive sample, and randomly select a negative sample that never co-occurred with Bernie supporter . We construct a triplet for each X i ∈ X superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑋 X^{i}\in X italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT ∈ italic_X using this method, and use these to fine-tune an mpnet-base Sentence-Bert model. Models were trained for 5 epochs for one day on a single A100 GPU.

Training Data

All models are trained on a sample of 3,534,903 bios from users who sent an English-language tweet captured in the Twitter Decahose 3 3 3 A sample of approximately 10% of all tweets. in 2020. We use the method from Pathak, Madani, and Joseph ( 2021 ) to extract identities from bios. Their extraction method consists of two steps, one where bios are split into chunks using a manually crafted regular expression, and a second cleaning step. For example, from the Twitter bio “Progressive Christian, wife, I am a proud Canadian,” their method extracts Progressive Christian , wife and proud Canadian . Given that our models learn from patterns in shared identity, we use only bios that contain at least two identities for training, with | V | 𝑉 |V| | italic_V | =22,516. A complete description of the dataset is available in the appendix.

We conduct four evaluations to assess model validity. The first is a prediction task, where we evaluate the full embedding space of each model and its ability to capture information that shapes users’ decisions on which sets of identities to place in their bio. The second connects our work to the existing literature on embedding and projecting individual social identities onto dimensions of social meaning. The third assesses our ability to project entire bios onto meaningful dimensions, with an eye towards validating our approach for our case study. Finally, the fourth task shows that our measures of partisanship correlate with other existing measures, and that our methods are associated with the behavior of interest (misinformation sharing) in the same way. Here, we describe each task and results for it in four separate subsections.

Can we Predict Held-out Identities?

Task description.

To perform this evaluation, we randomly sample another 1.5M Twitter bios from the Decahose using the same approach as above, creating an 80/20 train/test split between the two samples. For each observation in the test set, we ensure that at least one of the identities is in V 𝑉 V italic_V (which is defined using the training data). For the i 𝑖 i italic_i th sample, we then take one identity, X t i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑡 X^{i}_{t} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , as the hold-out target and call the rest of the bio X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT . We ensure X t i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑡 X^{i}_{t} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT is in V 𝑉 V italic_V , i.e. in all cases the target is observed at least once in the training data. This task notably favors the three new models we present here, in that they are each trained in a manner similar to the prediction task. However, the comparison is still useful to 1) ensure that fine-tuning works as expected and 2) to compare between the three new models. With respect to the latter point, there is reason to believe that the word2vec model should outperform the Fine-tuned BERT or fine-tuned SBERT model, because the word2vec model is trained only on in-domain data relevant to the task.

To generate predictions, we first generate an embedding for X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , L r i = e ⁢ m ⁢ b ⁢ e ⁢ d ⁢ d ⁢ i ⁢ n ⁢ g ⁢ ( X r i ) subscript superscript 𝐿 𝑖 𝑟 𝑒 𝑚 𝑏 𝑒 𝑑 𝑑 𝑖 𝑛 𝑔 subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 L^{i}_{r}=embedding(X^{i}_{r}) italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT = italic_e italic_m italic_b italic_e italic_d italic_d italic_i italic_n italic_g ( italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT ) 4 4 4 Extended details on how embeddings are generated for each model are in the Appendix. . We then measure the cosine similarity of L r i subscript superscript 𝐿 𝑖 𝑟 L^{i}_{r} italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT with the embedding of all identities v ∈ V 𝑣 𝑉 v\in V italic_v ∈ italic_V , S ⁢ i ⁢ m ⁢ i ⁢ l ⁢ a ⁢ r ⁢ i ⁢ t ⁢ y ⁢ ( L r i , L v i ) 𝑆 𝑖 𝑚 𝑖 𝑙 𝑎 𝑟 𝑖 𝑡 𝑦 subscript superscript 𝐿 𝑖 𝑟 subscript superscript 𝐿 𝑖 𝑣 Similarity(L^{i}_{r},L^{i}_{v}) italic_S italic_i italic_m italic_i italic_l italic_a italic_r italic_i italic_t italic_y ( italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_v end_POSTSUBSCRIPT ) , leaving us with | V | 𝑉 |V| | italic_V | similarity scores to L r i subscript superscript 𝐿 𝑖 𝑟 L^{i}_{r} italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT .We evaluate similarity scores returned by each model using two evaluation metrics: average rank and log softmax score . Average rank is computed by, for each test point, finding the ranking of X t i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑡 X^{i}_{t} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT in the scores produced by each model, and taking the average over all test points. The log softmax score draws on prior work (Joseph and Morgan 2021 ) and transforms similarity scores into a probability distribution using the softmax, and then takes the log of the result for X t i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑡 X^{i}_{t} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT .

Finally, for evaluating the out-of-domain generalizability of our models, i.e. how well the model generalizes to unseen identities, we split our test data into two sets, a Main Evaluation set, where X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT also contains at least one identity observed in the training data, and a Generalizability set, in which no identities in X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT are seen in the training data. This is necessary to fairly evaluate our Bio-only model , which has a restricted vocabulary and does not generalize to out-of-domain phrases, to the other models, each of which are capable of handling out-of-domain text. 5 5 5 Note that X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT can still contain phrases that the Bio-only model does not recognize and replaces them with the 0-vector. It is also a useful test of the (in-domain) generalizability of the other models. We evaluate results separately for these two test datasets.

We compare our models to three baseline DSMs used frequently in prior work: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019 ) , RoBERTa (Liu et al. 2019 ) , and Sentence-BERT (Reimers and Gurevych 2019 ) (see appendix for details) . As in much of the prior work (Lucy, Tadimeti, and Bamman 2022 ) , these approaches are not fine-tuned on bios, giving a baseline for how important in-domain training is for our problem.

In contrast to our expectations, the Fine-tuned SBERT model consistently outperforms all other models on both evaluation metrics on the Main Test set. Figure  1 shows this, and also reveals that the next best model, in all cases, was the Bio-only model , and that the Fine-tuned BERT model does not show the same jump in performance relative to the baseline BERT model that the Fine-tuned SBERT model does. Finally, we see that the baseline SBERT model outperforms the baseline BERT model.

The fact that the fine-tuned SBERT model improves over the Bio-only model, but the Fine-tuned BERT model does not, is evidence that knowledge from the pre-trained SBERT model (but not BERT) is useful in our setting. It also shows that performance gains cannot only be attributed to fine-tuning on in-domain language, but instead that our contrastive learning setup was effective and that Sentence-BERT is indeed the more effective initial model for fine-tuning, at least on this evaluation task. The second column of Figure  1 shows that the Fine-tuned SBERT model also performs best on the Generalizability test set. Even when the Fine-tuned model is not exposed to any of the identities in X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , it improves by nearly 100% over the standard SBERT model in terms of average rank. Figure  1 also makes clear that there is room for improvement. To this end, we conduct an error analysis ; see the appendix for details.

Do Projections of Single Identities Correlate with Human Judgements?

Following prior work (Joseph and Morgan 2020 ) , we assess how well our embeddings can be used to project identities onto dimensions of social meaning in ways that correlate with human judgements. As no prior work focuses on identities that are common in bios, however, we construct a novel survey dataset for this task. We provide brief details on the study here, full details can be found in the Appendix.

We asked 140 respondents on Prolific to rate 250 common identities in Twitter bios on three widely studied dimensions: gender, age, and partisanship. We use the mean of ratings for each identity on each dimension in our analysis. To select identities, we ranked identities in the Twitter dataset by frequency, and then manually selected the first 250 phrases that clearly signaled identity. For each identity on each dimension, respondents were asked to move a slider to represent their perception of where people who label themselves as that identity were likely to fall. For partisanship, for example, the slider ranged from “Always [a] Democrat” to “Always [a] Republican.” Figure  2 provides an example question. For gender and age, we followed the approach outlined by Joseph and Morgan ( 2020 ) exactly, using the same slider. Specifically, for age, participants were asked to rate identities on perceived age from 0-100, for gender, the question appears as in Figure  2 , replacing “Republican” with “Man” and “Democrat” with “Woman.”

To construct projections for each embedding model, for each identity, onto these dimensions, we follow the literature and 1) embed identities as defined above, 2) define a set of words and phrases that denotatively characterize each “end” of the dimension (e.g. “man” vs. “woman” for gender) and then 3) use these to project each identity onto a line in the embedding space defined by those two dimension ends, giving a single number. Several approaches exist to complete steps 2) and 3) ( Joseph and Morgan 2020 ) . We follow prior work where possible for 2), and for 3), i.e. to calculate similarity, we use RIPA, the method described by Ethayarajh, Duvenaud, and Hirst ( 2019 ) . Finally, for each embedding model on each dimension, we then compute the Spearman correlation between the projections and the survey data.

Figure  3 shows that our three models all perform at least as well—but not better than—the baselines for projections onto age, all significantly improve over baselines in measuring perceived partisanship, and significantly improve over the baselines, except for Fine-tuned BERT, on perceived gender. Our models’ improvements over baselines are particularly salient in comparison to the RoBERTa and BERT baselines. Notably, we also see that our Bio-only model, based on word2vec performs well compared to the more complex models on this task. This suggests that for phrases that are prominent in bios, this model (which trains only on the bios themselves) may be preferred. However, the Bio-only model cannot extend beyond the vocabulary, and thus (as we will see) struggles with generalizability. Finally, Figure  3 also shows that the greatest jumps in performance for our models, relative to the baseline, are clearly on the partisan dimension.

Do Projections of Entire Bios Correlate with Human Judgements?

Our third evaluation assess the question, can our model capture perceptions of self-presentation in entire bios? To address this, we conduct a similar analysis as above, comparing the Spearman correlation of projections of our embedding models to mean ratings by Prolific respondents on a survey task. There are, however, four primary differences between the evaluation of single identities and the one presented here for full bios.

First, of course, is that we ask respondents for their perceptions of entire bios, rather than individual identities within bios. More specifically, we randomly sample 1,300 bios of users in our case study data, described below. Second, because in our case study we are interested in religiosity as well as age, gender, and partisanship, we add a question regarding perceived level of religiosity to the survey. Third, as opposed to selecting only one approach for defining ends of the semantic axis onto which embeddings are projected, we consider two approaches. The first follows our second evaluation and uses a combination of prior work and author intuition to define the terms at each end of the axis. Motivated to ensure accurate measurements for our case study, the second considers whether or not we can improve correlations with human judgement by constructing lists of terms for dimension endpoints that are informed by a qualitative analysis of bios. More specifically, we manually explore bios from the case study data described below that are not included in the survey study and use them to define the list of terms. We compare performance using both approaches here, but ensure that we compute results only on bios that do not include terms that explicitly define our endpoints . Fourth, we opt to only compare performance of SBERT and Fine-tuned SBERT, as other models fared poorly on one or both of the prior evaluations.

All other details of our evaluation generally match those in our second evaluation, save for the sample of Prolific users; see the appendix for details on this.

Figure  4 shows that the Fine-tuned SBERT model has a significantly higher correlation with human judgements on dimensions of partisanship and religion, regardless of how endpoints of the dimensions are defined. For gender and age, Fine-tuned SBERT performance shows no significant improvement over a non-fine-tuned SBERT model, but is also not significantly impacted by how dimension endpoints are defined. In contrast, for the SBERT model, in one case (age) our use of qualitative exploration to find in-domain sets of phrases to define dimensions significantly increases correlations with human judgement, and in the other (gender) it significantly decreases correlations. These results suggest that the Fine-tuned SBERT model is therefore more robust to the known challenge of defining “good” sets of phrases to define endpoints (Joseph and Morgan 2020 ) .

How do our Projections Compare to Other Measures at the User Level?

In our final evaluation, we focus specifically on projections of bios onto partisanship and explore 1) how well these projections correlate with a different measure of user partisanship (evaluating convergent validity), and 2) whether or not our measure of partisanship correlates in expected ways—and in a similar way to the other measure of user partisanship— with misinformation sharing (evaluating hypothesis validity Jacobs and Wallach 2021 ) . To conduct these evaluations, we make use of a pre-existing dataset of 374,684 Twitter users 1) for whom prior work (McCabe et al. 2022 ) has computed a standard measure of user ideology using user follower networks, and 2) for whom we have data on the sharing of low-quality news sites.

With respect to the partisanship measure we compare to, McCabe et al. ( 2022 ) apply a method pioneered by Barberá et al. ( 2015 ) that uses a combination of information about the partisanship of elite Twitter users and follower relationships to compute an estimate of user partisan ideology. McCabe et al. ( 2022 ) adopt the same approach, but update information about elites from the 2012 data used by Barberá et al. ( 2015 ) to 2020 data, and apply the approach to a large set of Twitter users that they linked to voter registration records using established methods (Hughes et al. 2021 ) . The work from McCabe et al. ( 2022 ) presents full details on implementation and an extensive validation of the measure in comparison to voter registration data; we therefore refer the reader to their work these details and focus here only on a comparison between their updated version of Barberá et al. ’s 2015 method and our partisanship measure using bio data.

With respect to the sharing of low-quality news, we focus on the proportion of URLs to low- and high-quality news websites shared on Twitter by these users from July 1st, 2020 through May 31st, 2021. We determine whether a URL comes from a low- or high-quality news website by making use of 1) the list produced by Grinberg et al. ( 2019 ) (who categorize sites into a binary high or low-quality distinction) and 2) the NewsGuard domain rating list. NewsGuard is an organization that maintains a widely-used (e.g Altay, Nielsen, and Fletcher 2022 ; Horne, Nørregaard, and Adalı 2019 ) list of news websites that are rated on a scale of 0-100 for information quality. We follow prior work and dichotomize their ratings into a binary low- or high-quality value for each site. We use a score of 60 as the threshold, following prior work (Lin et al. 2022 ) . Further, while we opt for a particular definition across these two lists, we note that prior work (Lin et al. 2022 ) has shown that various lists of misinformation domains are highly correlated, and thus that results for the study of misinformation are unlikely to be sensitive to these types of changes. Using these binary domain scores, we define our outcome variable for an individual user as the percentage of all URLs the user shares that come from a low-quality news site, divided by the total number of URLs shared from a domain listed in NewsGuard. We refer to this outcome as the proportion of low-quality shares .

Finally, for our bio-based measure, we use user bios collected in July of 2020 (i.e. within the same timeframe of the following data and misinformation sharing data), and project bios onto partisanship using the methods detailed in our evaluation of full bio embeddings (our third evaluation).

We find a correlation of 0.39 [0.387,0.393] between the bio-based projection measure of partisanship using our fine-tuned SBERT model and the partisanship estimates from McCabe et al. ( 2022 ) . This correlation is nearly double the correlation we find between the bio-based projection measure computed using the non-fine-tuned SBERT model and the estimates from McCabe et al. ( 2022 ) (0.197 [0.193,0.201]), and even higher than the correlation between the fine-tuned SBERT model and the non-fine-tuned model (0.347 [0.343,0.35]). This strong correlation, even when compared to reasonable baselines, gives us further confidence in the convergent validity of our measure—while we should not expect a measure based on a more private behavior (following) to correlate exactly with one based on a more public behavior (text in bios), we do see, as expected, a reasonably strong relationship.

We also find that these two measures show consistent estimates of the relationship between partisanship and misinformation sharing. These estimates, moreover, conform with what we would expect from prior work (Grinberg et al. 2019 ; Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019 ) . More specifically, Figure  5 shows the estimated proportion of low-quality shares from a binomial regression model where the independent variables are indicators for partisanship after bucketing each variable into 10 separate bins of equal numbers of users, respectively. 6 6 6 Binning is done to avoid assumptions about the precision of these proxy variables and to ease interpretation; bin sizes selected here are for visual clarity. Results are not, however, sensitive to this decision. All main effects in the model used to estimate the proportions shown in Figure  5 are significant at p ≤ .001 𝑝 .001 p\leq.001 italic_p ≤ .001 , and trends between the two different measures are consistent in showing that those furthest to the partisan right are most likely to share low quality news.

Misinformation Case Study

The previous evaluations show that our Fine-tuned SBERT model can project bios onto social dimensions of meaning in ways that correlate with how those bios are likely to be perceived by humans , and that the approach has both convergent validity and hypothesis validity in comparison to a different measure of user partisanship. Our case study uses the same dataset, but leverages our methodology to explore the link between self-presentation in bios and the rate of low- versus high-quality news sharing in the context of our two research questions. First, we explore the interaction between self-presentations of age and partisanship and their association with low-quality new sharing. Second, we consider the association between self-presenting as religious and misinformation sharing.

We note that while it would be possible for McCabe et al. ( 2022 ) to make use of additional voter registration data to, e.g., control for age, our tool is still useful for two reasons. First, most existing social media datasets are not connected to voter registration data, nor are the aligned with follower network data that could be used to apply the method from Barberá et al. ( 2015 ) . To this end, we are able to use our methods to replicate our analysis on a new dataset from the Twitter Decahose, which we could not do otherwise (see appendix for details). Second, we note that an analysis of religiosity is in any case not possible with existing voter registration data, as religiosity does not exist within versions of these data that have been provided to researchers in the past.

With respect to our first research question on the interaction between age and partisan self-presentation, we find that the direction of effects for age and partisanship generally match prior work, but that interaction effects not observed in prior work on demographics appear in our analyses. Figure  6 more specifically shows that users who self-present as older and right leaning is associated with a superlinear increase in proportion of low-quality news shared relative to being old or right-leaning.

Addressing our second research question, and using the same binning approach with univariate statistical models, we observe in Figure  6 B) that self-presenting as being highly religious is also associated with statistically significant ( p < .001 𝑝 .001 p<.001 italic_p < .001 ) jumps in the proportion of low-quality shares. As in the real world (Druckman et al. 2021 ) , our measures of religiosity and partisanship are highly correlated (at 0.76) , and thus we do not attempt to tease out whether this effect is particularly salient conditioned on partisanship. More specifically, we avoid interpretation of coefficients in a model with both of these variables because interpretation of regression coefficients with strongly co-linear variables is prone to misidentification of effect size and statistical significance (Gregorich et al. 2021 ) .

We do find, however, that religiosity adds additional predictive power, in that adding religiosity as a predictor to a model with partisanship results in a statistically significant increase ( p < .001 𝑝 .001 p<.001 italic_p < .001 ) in predictive power. Descriptive statistics do, however, provide some evidence into a potential interactive relationship between partisanship, religiosity, and sharing content from low-quality sites. Specifically, Figure  9 in the appendix shows that partisanship and religiosity may have a multiplicative association with sharing content from low-quality news sites. Participants who present as both right-leaning and religious have, on average, higher odds of sharing low-quality news links than users who present as only right-leaning or only religious. Future experimental work targeting this specific interaction effect in ways that avoid endogeneity concerns might therefore be of interest.

Critically, all findings presented here extend beyond this particular dataset to a second large dataset of misinformation sharing drawn from a broader population in the Twitter Decahose. These replication results are presented in the appendix.

Discussion and Conclusion

We present, evaluate, make public, and make use of new methods to project Twitter bios onto meaningful social dimensions. Methodologically, our contribution is not innovation in algorithm development, but in the application of standard algorithms to carefully constructed training datasets and training set-ups to build entity-centric identity embedding spaces (where identities that are commonly presented for the same people are represented in a similar space). Notably, our estimates of self-presentation do not use other user behaviors (e.g. retweets).

After extensively validating our proposed methods, we present a case study on two open questions in the literature on misinformation sharing online. In response to our first question, we find an interaction effect between age and partisanship- that Twitter users presentinand Republican share a much higher proportion of low-quality news. With respect to our second research question, we similarly find that individuals who self-present as religious, perhaps especially on the political right, are much more likely to share a higher proportion of low-quality news. Our results have two important implications. With respect to combating misinformation online, while much work has considered interventions targeted along partisan (Martel et al. 2024 ) or age-based (Brashier and Schacter 2020 ) , our results provide evidence that we should be considering even more narrow interventions targeted at older and right-leaning Americans. With respect to better understanding the misinformation environment online in the U.S., our work provides critical empirical validation of theories that suggest religiosity is an important component of the quality of information consumed and spread online (Druckman et al. 2021 ) .

However, our work contains a number of limitations that should be considered. Specific to our case study, we follow previous work that uses a domain-based approach to identify misinformation sharing (Grinberg et al. 2019 ; Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019 ; Moore, Dahlke, and Hancock 2023 ) , which includes posts that share a URL with a negative annotation. However, like previous work, we find the number of such posts to be a small proportion of all shares. While other work referenced above suggests our efforts should extend to other social media sites, Twitter, like all sites, has particular elements that limit our ability to generalize claims about self-presentation elsewhere, in particular to “offline” behavior settings (DeVito, Walker, and Birnholtz 2018 ) . In particular, our models learn cultural associations from the majority white, male, younger, and left-leaning users of Twitter (Hughes et al. 2021 ) . Similarly, our survey evaluation data is largely drawn from white, American women, which limits their generalizability.

Our work is also contextualized in a particular period of time, and thus may not be responsive to significant shifts in social identity. All of these, and results described in the paper, emphasize the contextualized nature of our trained models and datasets. While we hope that future work might expand beyond them, others should consider using our publicly available code to fine-tune our models on their own data. Finally, our case study is necessarily terse, and does not explore a number of additional important and interesting questions. In particular, there may be other interesting dimensions of self-presentation that may be interesting to social scientists interested in misinformation sharing on social media. Our work also has ethical implications, which we discuss in more detail in the Ethics Statement below, as well as in the required paper checklist. Our hope, however, is that the proposed, and public, methods allow future efforts that explore new questions that link identity and behavior on Twitter and other sites with social media bios.

Acknowledgements

NM and KJ were supported by an ONR MURI N00014-20-S-F003 and by NSF IIS2145051. SM was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through a grant to the Institute for Data, Democracy, & Politics at the George Washington University. RB was supported by the MSCA Grant Agreement No. 101073351 at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

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Paper Checklist

One can crudely separate the way that members of the NLP community acknowledge sociocultural associations embedded in language into three camps. In the first, acknowledgement is largely non-existent, with scholars either choosing to ignore the social implications of language or arguing that it is not within their purview to address them. In the second, scholars concerned with the potential that NLP tools might reify biases in language have sought to develop tools to reduce or remove the use of biased tools in production. Example efforts include the literature on “debiasing” embedding spaces—where scholars aim to remove meaning on “unwanted dimensions” (i.e. on social dimensions of meaning) and keep it only on “objective” dimensions (i.e. on more traditional semantic dimensions)— and work to carefully elaborate how problems can arise from NLP tools that do not critically engage with the social implications of language (Blodgett et al. 2020 ; Field et al. 2021 ) .

While we strongly support the latter line of critical scholarship, we fall into a third camp of NLP researchers, who see the potential for NLP methods that capture social meaning in language to help inform our understanding of society and its behaviors (Kozlowski, Taddy, and Evans 2019 ; Bailey, Williams, and Cimpian 2022 ; Garg et al. 2018 ) . As individuals who are supportive of existent critical literature, and who are still building methods that are inherently engaging in stereotyping, we must accept that our methods can be used not only to measure perceptions and self-presentations but also to apply them for nefarious purposes, such as racially-biased targeted advertising (Ali et al. 2019 ) . The ultimate ethical question that we must address, then, is whether we believe that our measurement strategies will ultimately do more harm than good.

Our decision to submit the present work for consideration reflects our belief, after deliberation, that the potential benefits of our work outweigh the potential dangers. From a benefits perspective, we show that our work can help us understand the (mis)information environment on Twitter, and hope in the future to use these methods to better understand 1) how hegemonic voices are often given outsized attention on social media platforms, and 2) how attacks on marginalized communities changed along with the political climate in the United States. From a misuse perspective, we do not believe that the methods we have developed here are more effective at targeting individuals based on stereotyped demographics than the tools already in existence elsewhere, tools which use orders of magnitude more compute data and power. As such, while there are real dangers with being misclassified in a particular way online, we 1) emphasize throughout the paper that we focus only on how someone is likely to be perceived based on what is in their bio, and do not claim to be able to classify some “true self” of users, and 2) expect that if one wanted to engage in such a prediction activity, it could be done better with methods that focus specifically on this task.

A similar value judgement was applied to the other ethical question in our work: whether or not to publicly release parts of our data. Ultimately, restrictions on the Decahose have made it challenging to share data. However, given recent literature in the ICWSM community (Assenmacher et al. 2020 ) , we believe the appropriate course of action is to release training data on a per-case basis, as potential dataset users contact the last author of this paper. However, we believe that the release of our (fully deidentified) survey data and basic case study data does not serve any inherent risks for users in our dataset, and thus have opted to do so in the Github repository for this work. We believe that the utility of these data to the scientific community, both for replicability and extension, outweigh the dangers of data release. Of course, in all cases, data and methods usage is a continually evolving process, and we will re-evaluate this value judgement as often as is needed.

For most authors…

Would answering this research question advance science without violating social contracts, such as violating privacy norms, perpetuating unfair profiling, exacerbating the socio-economic divide, or implying disrespect to societies or cultures? As noted above, there are privacy concerns in our work that we have carefully considered and weighed relative to the benefits of our work.

Do your main claims in the abstract and introduction accurately reflect the paper’s contributions and scope? Yes

Do you clarify how the proposed methodological approach is appropriate for the claims made? Yes

Do you clarify what are possible artifacts in the data used, given population-specific distributions? Yes

Did you describe the limitations of your work? Yes

Did you discuss any potential negative societal impacts of your work? Yes, see the Ethics Statement

Did you discuss any potential misuse of your work? Yes, see the Ethics Statement

Did you describe steps taken to prevent or mitigate potential negative outcomes of the research, such as data and model documentation, data anonymization, responsible release, access control, and the reproducibility of findings? Yes, see the Ethics Statement

Have you read the ethics review guidelines and ensured that your paper conforms to them? Yes

Additionally, if your study involves hypotheses testing…

Did you clearly state the assumptions underlying all theoretical results? NA

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Did you discuss competing hypotheses or theories that might challenge or complement your theoretical results? NA

Have you considered alternative mechanisms or explanations that might account for the same outcomes observed in your study? NA

Did you address potential biases or limitations in your theoretical framework? NA

Have you related your theoretical results to the existing literature in social science? NA

Did you discuss the implications of your theoretical results for policy, practice, or further research in the social science domain? NA

Additionally, if you are including theoretical proofs…

Did you state the full set of assumptions of all theoretical results? NA

Did you include complete proofs of all theoretical results? NA

Additionally, if you ran machine learning experiments…

Did you include the code, data, and instructions needed to reproduce the main experimental results (either in the supplemental material or as a URL)? See the Github link in the first footnote

Did you specify all the training details (e.g., data splits, hyperparameters, how they were chosen)? See the main text as well as the appendix below

Did you report error bars (e.g., with respect to the random seed after running experiments multiple times)? Yes

Did you include the total amount of compute and the type of resources used (e.g., type of GPUs, internal cluster, or cloud provider)? Yes

Do you justify how the proposed evaluation is sufficient and appropriate to the claims made? Yes. Specifically, we use a number of clear, competitive, and comparable baselines

Do you discuss what is “the cost“ of misclassification and fault (in)tolerance? Yes, see the Ethics statement.

Additionally, if you are using existing assets (e.g., code, data, models) or curating/releasing new assets, without compromising anonymity …

If your work uses existing assets, did you cite the creators? Yes.

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Did you discuss whether and how consent was obtained from people whose data you’re using/curating? We provide details on the dataset, acknowledging that consent was approved in surveys as IRB requires. Social media users are non-consenting, which we acknowledge in our Ethics statement.

Did you discuss whether the data you are using/curating contains personally identifiable information or offensive content? Yes, see the ethics statement

If you are curating or releasing new datasets, did you discuss how you intend to make your datasets FAIR? In progress for the camera ready version

If you are curating or releasing new datasets, did you create a Datasheet for the Dataset? In progress for the camera ready version.

Additionally, if you used crowdsourcing or conducted research with human subjects, without compromising anonymity …

Did you include the full text of instructions given to participants and screenshots? We use a protocol from a prior work, which we do reference.

Did you describe any potential participant risks, with mentions of Institutional Review Board (IRB) approvals? Yes, our studies are IRB approved.

Did you include the estimated hourly wage paid to participants and the total amount spent on participant compensation? Yes.

Did you discuss how data is stored, shared, and deidentified? Yes.

Appendix A Appendix

Bios from the twitter decahose.

The center column of Table 1 provides summary statistics for the Twitter bio data we construct. We begin with a sample of 15,459,872 distinct Twitter bios from users who posted a tweet in 2020 that was found in the Decahose, and who are specified as English-language users by the Twitter API. In order to maintain a focus on culturally-salient identities, we limit the size of the vocabulary to identities used in at least 100 unique Twitter bios in the training set. Further, because we are interested in associations between identities, we further remove Twitter bios that contain less than 2 identities. After these cleaning steps, our training and test data consists of 3,534,903 and 1,546,001 distinct bios respectively with 22,516 unique identities in the vocabulary. We then follow the approach outlined in the main text to produce the main test dataset and the generalizability test set. Note that the size of each of these splits can be larger than the size of cleaned test dataset, because we can generate multiple instances from a given bio by randomly selecting different targets; i.e. we can generate multiple test instances out of each of profile description by selecting multiple pairs of X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT and X t i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑡 X^{i}_{t} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT .

Finally, to provide further insight into the data, Table 2 showcases the top 7 identities in terms of overall frequency in the training data and 7 of the least frequent identities to show that the tail still contains meaningful phrases.

Single Identity Survey Data

A complete, aggregated copy of this data is provided in the Github for this paper. Our survey study was ruled exempt by the IRB at [REMOVED]. Each respondent rated between four and seven identities, and each identity was given to at least 3 respondents. Respondents were paid an average of $12/hour. Respondents are from a convenience sample, as recent work has suggested that the cost efficiency of convenience samples does not necessarily impact data quality (Coppock, Leeper, and Mullinix 2018 ) . The median age of our sample is 32. Of the 140 respondents, 88 reported their sex as female, 49 as male, and 4 noted other/did not provide. Our sample, like Twitter, was overwhelmingly White; 105 (75%) of the sample reported as White.

We here provide two minor additional details on our survey data. First, it is of note that in contrast to prior work, we focus explicitly on priming respondents to think of social media users, asking, for example, “If you saw [identity] in a social media biography, would you expect that individual to be” and then provided a Likert scale ranging from (e.g.) “Always [a] Democrat” to “Always [a] Republican.” Second, we emphasize that other procedures, including tutorial materials, task details, and attention checks, follow the publicly available materials from Joseph and Morgan ( 2020 ) .

Entire Bio Survey Data

A complete, aggregated copy of this data is provided in the Github for this paper.

We use responses from approximately 730 Prolific respondents. Because of a temporary issue with the survey, some respondents were approved for pay without taking the study, we report demographics here on all respondents here because of this issue. The median age of respondents was 37. Reported sex was more balanced than the sample for the single identity study, 51% and 44% of respondents reported a sex of female or male, respectively. As above, however, a majority of the sample (65%) reported as White. Respondents were paid an average of $12/hour. Full details are provided in the Appendix for the interested reader.

Two final notes are in order. First, with respect to the difference between the two surveys is that because we focus on individual user bios, we in this study ask respondents to assess the likelihood that the individual user who has this bio is, e.g., a Democrat or Republican, rather than asking (as above) about the probability that an individual who holds a given identity is, e.g., a Democrat or Republican. Second, we note that we drop the 5% of respondents whose responses were furthest from all other respondents, on average, across all identities and dimensions (after standardizing measures across dimensions). This results in a final sample of 1,273 bios analyzed here and provided in the Github repository.

Replication with Data from the Decahose

We replicate findings using the case study dataset analyzed in the main text with a different dataset, broader in scope, drawn from the Decahose. A complete, anonymized copy of this replication data is provided in the Github for this paper. For each user, it contains the number of URLs they shared that link to low- and high-quality domains, as identified by NewsGuard, and projections of their bios onto the four dimensions of interest to the case study.

We begin with a sample of roughly 290,000 users who tweeted at least one NewsGuard URL in the decahose in 2020. Of this sample, 143,883 users were 1) still active when we recollected tweets in 2022, and 2) had a non-empty English-language bio. It is possible that our use of langdetect could bias our sampling of what is considered English language (Blodgett, Green, and O’Connor 2016 ) ; as such, we manually evaluate it. To do so, we had three research assistants label 900 bios as English, not English, or Vague. The annotators had a Krippendorf’s alpha agreement score of 0.81 and agreed on 90% of the bios with the library. More specific to our case study, 93% of the bios that langdetect measured as English were also annotated as English by all the annotator. The main reason for mis-classification of the bio’s language was that some bios consisted of phrases from multiple languages. We therefore believe that this step did not bias our results in any obvious way.

Of these remaining 143,883 users who matched our initial sampling criteria, a remaining 108,554, or 75.4%, had at least 5 shares of URLs in NewsGuard, which we considered a minimum for estimating proportions. The median user had 49 shares of high quality news website URLs and 3 shares of low quality news website URLs. In total, these users shared 11,735,521 links to NewsGuard domains we assess in our study.

Figure  7 replicates findings from Figure  6 A) in the main text, namely, observe a similar increase in the association between self-presented (older) age and misinformation sharing as we see an increase in right-leaning self-presentation. Figure  8 replicates Figure  6 B).

Descriptive Statistics Partisanship and Religiosity

Figure  9 shows a descriptive statistic that provides some evidence that religiosity and partisanship have an interactive effect on misinformation sharing. However, as noted in the main text, correlations between these variables make it challenging to assess the statistical significance of these variables relative to each other; in particular, there are few left-leaning accounts that also present as religious.

Distributional Semantic Models (Baselines)

For all DSM baseline models except Sentence Bert, including BERT-base, RoBERTa-base and BerTweet-base we experimented using open-source implementations on Hugging Face transformers library 7 7 7 https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/ . For the Sentence-Bert baseline, we used the mpnet-base pre-trained model and the implementation given by open-source Sentence Transformers library. 8 8 8 https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers

Bio-only Model

To select hyperparameters, we use 10% of the training data as a validation dataset. The primary hyperparameter we tuned was whether to use a Skip-Gram or C-BOW model. We ultimately chose a Skip-Gram model for Twitter and a C-BOW model for Wikipedia, with the other hyperparameters as specified in the main text. Model training took under an hour on a personal laptop. We used the open-source implementation of word2vec in gensim 9 9 9 https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/ for our experiments.

We here briefly provide additional intuition for our Fine-tuned SBERT model. Given a dataset of pairs of identity phrases with a label denoting the anchor-positive pair or anchor-negative pairs, we input the pair into the pipeline shown in Figure 10 and extract the latent embeddings of each of the identities. Then we calculate the cosine similarity of the embeddings and backpropagate the mean squared error loss with the label through the network. In this work we fine-tuned a mpnet-base Sentence Bert model since it had the same model size as a BERT-base and the pre-trained model was available online.

Further details on Baseline Models

For all DSM baseline models except Sentence Bert, including BERT-base, RoBERTa-base and BerTweet-base we experimented using open-source implementations on Hugging Face transformers library 10 10 10 https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/ . For the Sentence-Bert baseline, we used the mpnet-base pre-trained model and the implementation given by open-source Sentence Transformers library. 11 11 11 https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers .

Other Baseline Models Considered

In addition to the three baseline models discussed in the text, we also experimented with a pair of other sensible options.

First, we expected that a DSM pretrained on Twitter would be a strong baseline to compare to, and thus experimented with additional models pre-trained specifically on Twitter data (Nguyen, Vu, and Tuan Nguyen 2020 ) . We use the fine-tuned BERT model on Twitter data proposed by (Nguyen, Vu, and Tuan Nguyen 2020 ) . They propose a BERT-base model fine-tuned using a corpus of 850M English Tweets. However, we find that model performance was no better than the other, more widely used baseline DSMs we proposed in the main experiments.

Second, it seemed reasonable that by first restricting a baseline DSM to known dimensions of social meaning, we could improve their performance. Consequently, we considered baselines where we first projected down all baseline models into the core dimensions of meaning noted by Joseph and Morgan ( 2020 ) before the evaluation tasks. In both cases, however, our intuitions did not match empirical reality. These models failed to outperform the baselines used in the main text, and thus we restrict our analysis to the baselines discussed in the main text.

Generating Embeddings for the Predictive Experiment

In order to build inputs to the network, since X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT is a list of personal identifiers, to calculate the latent embedding L r i subscript superscript 𝐿 𝑖 𝑟 L^{i}_{r} italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT for it, depending on the model, we follow different procedures. For the Bio-only model, we simply measure the average latent vector of all phrases in X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT according to ( 1 ). For the Fine-tuned models, as well as the baseline contextualized language models discussed below, we stitch the words in X r i subscript superscript 𝑋 𝑖 𝑟 X^{i}_{r} italic_X start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT together with comma and create a sentence S r i subscript superscript 𝑆 𝑖 𝑟 S^{i}_{r} italic_S start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT . We then measure L r i subscript superscript 𝐿 𝑖 𝑟 L^{i}_{r} italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_r end_POSTSUBSCRIPT according to Equation ( 2 ). Equivalently, this means that for the BERT based models we take the embedding of [CLS] token for pooling and for the Sentence Bert based models we follow the original work and take the average of all token embeddings.

Projection to Social Dimensions

In order to project a piece of text (either a full bio or a single identity) onto a specific dimension, we have to first define the end-points of that dimension. Table 3 and 4 outline the original and in-domain dimension end-points that we talk about in this paper, in particular in our Entire bio projection evaluation. To generate embeddings for an end-point, we assume each end-point is an instance in X 𝑋 X italic_X and follow the approach outlined above to generate embeddings for each end-point of the dimension d 𝑑 d italic_d and call them E d 1 superscript subscript 𝐸 𝑑 1 E_{d}^{1} italic_E start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_d end_POSTSUBSCRIPT start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT 1 end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT and E d 2 superscript subscript 𝐸 𝑑 2 E_{d}^{2} italic_E start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_d end_POSTSUBSCRIPT start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT 2 end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT respectively. Having the embedding of both poles of the dimension, we calculate the difference vector according to Equation 3 , and calculate the embedding of the target text using the same approach to a vector L i superscript 𝐿 𝑖 L^{i} italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT . Then we follow the projection approach outlined in (Ethayarajh, Duvenaud, and Hirst 2019 ) to normalize all vectors and then calculate the projection value of L i superscript 𝐿 𝑖 L^{i} italic_L start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_i end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT onto dimension d 𝑑 d italic_d according to equation 4 .

Error Analysis of The Predictive Task

Our understanding of the proposed models is improved by studying where errors occur. Here, we briefly present both quantitative and qualitative reflections on the major sources of error for the Bio-Only and Fine-tuned SBERT models. At a high level, we find that pre-training helps the Fine-tuned SBERT model on predictions requiring knowledge of phrase composition (e.g. that “mother” and “mother of two” convey similar meanings), but appear to cause it to struggle on infrequent identities, which the Bio-only model is better able to capture meanings of from the bio data alone.

Quantitatively, Figure  11 shows that both models performed best, and roughly equally well, on the most frequent identities, but that differences appeared in how the models fared elsewhere. The Bio-only model’s ranking distribution (the marginal density plot on the right-hand side of Figure  11 ) was bimodal, with a large number of high (poor performance) and low (strong performance) ranks for test points. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find qualitatively that the poor performance of the Bio-only model relative to the Fine-tuned SBERT model largely came from an inability 1) to learn from compositional identities or 2) to leverage relevant external knowledge. These issues seemed to impact the model most for moderately frequent target identities, those appearing between 300-10,000 times in the training data. With respect to 1), for example, when provided the Twitter bio “mother of two, restaurant owner, partly retired, hockey coach” 12 12 12 This bio has been modified to protect user privacy , the Bio-only model ranks the correct held-out identity, “wife,” among the least likely. In contrast, the Fine-tuned SBERT model correctly ranks “wife” in the Top 1%. The core difference is that the Fine-tuned SBERT model, but not the Bio-only model, leverages the gender stereotype implied by the “mother” portion of the phrase “mother of two.” With respect to 2), there were several cases where external knowledge from the pre-trained model benefited the Fine-tuned models. For example, the Fine-tuned models, but not the Bio-only models, were able to recognize the similarity between the identities “follower of ISKSON” (a Hindu religious organization) and “proud Hindu.” Both of these were relatively infrequently used.

In contrast, relative to the Bio-only model, Fine-tuned models struggled with the most infrequent identities, in particular the roughly 18% of identifiers in the test set that occurred fewer than 300 times in the training data. In these cases, as in prior work entity-centric domain adaptive work (Field and Tsvetkov 2019 ) , the Fine-tuned models seemed to rely too heavily on knowledge from the pre-trained model and not enough to domain-relevant context. In contrast, the identity-centric model seemed to benefit on the prediction task from overfitting to stereotypical knowledge for these rarer phrases. The Fine-tuned models also struggled when presented with identities, such as Twitter-specific acronyms, that were likely rare in the DSM data, but more frequent on Twitter. Here, pre-training seemed to induce noise, leading the Fine-tuned models to predict somewhat randomly.