As a student, I cringed whenever the author of a book launched into a discussion of the history of his or her topic. But I see now that understanding something about the development of an area helps us understand the area itself—its emphases, biases, controversies, blind spots, and so on. So, please bear with me. I’ll make this history as brief and as painless as possible.
Interest in self-presentation emerged somewhat independently at about the same time in psychology and sociology. Although it may seem that sociologists and psychologists (especially social psychologists) would have many things in common, connections between the disciplines have traditionally been weak, and sociologists and psychologists have typically relied little on each other’s work. However, researchers interested in self-presentation would find it nearly impossible to carry out their work without relying on concepts, theories, and research from both sociology and psychology.
Goffman and the Sociological Approach
The systematic study of self-presentation began with the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. Although he wrote many essays relevant to the study of human interaction, Goffman’s major contribution was The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959. Goffman’s basic premise was that many of the most revealing insights about social behavior are to be found not in analyzing people’s inner motives or personalities, but in studying the surface appearances people create for one another. Whereas psychologists often look beyond people’s overt behavior to understand their “true” underlying motives and characteristics, Goffman insisted that much can be gained by focusing on public behavior.
In the course of social life, people’s responses to one another are heavily based on these surface appearances. Contrary to the advice we receive, we do judge books (and people) by their covers. And, because of this, people often present images of themselves that affect others’ judgments and reactions. According to Goff nan, a full understanding of human behavior requires that we pay attention to these public images. His view was consistent with Cooley’s (1902) claim that “the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society” (p. 87). For Goffman, people control how other people treat them by influencing others’ definition of the situation. They influence others’ definition of the situation by giving others the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with their objectives. “Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey” (Goffman, 1959, p. 4).
According to Goffman, self-presentation is not only functional for the individual, but it is essential for smooth interaction. Effective social interaction requires that the interactants know a little about one another—about one another’s socioeconomic status, attitudes, trustworthiness, competence, and so on. Yet, interactants often find it difficult to learn much about other people. Here’s where self-presentation helps. The public images people convey give other interactants some idea of how they expect to be treated and how they should expect to treat others.
Goffman seemed particularly interested in what happens when self-presentation goes awry. When the impressions people project are contradicted or discredited, the interaction is disrupted. In fact, the interaction often grinds to a halt until the person’s public image is successfully restored (Goffman, 1955, 1959, 1967). Goffman wrote extensively about embarrassment and face-work, topics we explore in later chapters.
Goffman has been associated with what is known as the “dramaturgical approach” because he made great use of metaphors of the theater, complete with acts, roles, props, audiences, and backstage areas. However, nowhere in his writings does Goffman argue that life is nothing but a stage or that men and women are merely actors. Rather, he used the idea of life as drama as an analogy or metaphor to elucidate certain facts about social life (Brissett & Edgley, 1990).
Goffman’s work was more akin to social anthropology than sociology (indeed, his Master’s degree was in anthropology). His articles and books were essentially anthropological descriptions of everyday interactions in Western society. Rather than recording the habits of the natives in some far-off land, he watched the interactions of people in the British Isles and United States. Goffman was an astute observer of human behavior with the ability to see processes of social life in new ways and to describe them in an engaging fashion.
Jones and Social Psychology
At about the same time Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Edward Jones, a social psychologist, began a program of work on flattery. At the time, Jones was unfamiliar with Goffman’s work but became involved with self-presentation because of his interest in how people figure out what other people are like. Jones realized that our perceptions of other people are determined in part by their attempts to convey particular impressions of themselves. As Jones (1990) put it, “the study of impression management and self-presentation is an integral part of the study of interpersonal perception. We cannot understand how people perceive each other without at the same time understanding the dynamics of self-presentation” (p. 170). Thus, from early work on how people ingratiate themselves to others (Jones, 1964; Jones & Wortman, 1973), Jones moved on to study many facets of the self-presentation process.
Jones’ approach to research on self-presentation was quite different from Goffman’s. Whereas Goffman reported what were essentially anthropological field observations in narrative essays, Jones and his students designed laboratory experiments to investigate specific factors that affect self-presentation. Goffman tried to persuade his readers of his insights through observations and anecdotes, whereas Jones tried to confirm and disconfirm particular theoretical ideas through controlled experimentation.
Jones’ contribution to the study of self-presentation cannot be overestimated. Not only did he produce a wealth of empirical studies on the topic and offered important theoretical advances, but he trained several social psychologists who went on to make contributions to the area of self-presentation in their own right. We’ll encounter the contributions of Jones and his students throughout this book.
Resistance to Self-Presentation
From the beginning, some social psychologists, as well as many lay people, were extremely interested in self-presentation. Many realized that a great deal of social behavior is affected by people’s concerns with others’ impressions of them. However, self-presentation did not begin to emerge as a mainline area of interest among behavioral researchers for many years, and some researchers initially displayed outright resistance to self-presentational approaches. Jones noted that, when he first became interested in self-presentation in the early 1960s, some of his colleagues seemed to feel that he had entered a domain of investigation that was “as unsettling and almost as disreputable as parapsychology” (personal communication, March 17, 1992). One manifestation of this disinterest in self-presentation was that, until recently, it was difficult to find the terms “self-presentation” or “impression management” in the indexes of most textbooks on social psychology.
The reasons for this resistance to the topic are not entirely clear, particularly when one considers how much of human behavior is affected by self-presentational motives. I recently asked four of the most productive researchers in the area of self-presentation—Edward Jones, James Tedeschi, Barry Schlenker, and Roy Baumeister—why they thought self-presentation had remained on the periphery of social psychology for so long. They offered four basic explanations.
Part of the resistance may have come from the fact that many psychologists initially viewed self-presentation as inherently manipulative and deceptive, the ugly underbelly of interpersonal life. As we have seen, self-presentation is not necessarily inauthentic, but this view may have led some to regard the topic as unsavory or unnecessarily narrow (see, for example, Buss & Briggs, 1984).
Furthermore, during the past 20 years, social psychology has been dominated by an interest in cognitive processes—attribution, person perception, social cognition, and the like—and motivational processes have taken a back seat. Because the study of self-presentation focused on people’s interpersonal motives, it attracted less attention than certain other topics.
Third, during the 1970s, some researchers became frustrated by the fact that self-presentation theorists offered impression management as an alternative to accepted explanations of many interpersonal phenomena. It seemed to some that the self-presentation perspective could explain almost anything. Punching holes in a lot of other people’s theoretical balloons didn’t win the self-presentational perspective many allies. As Baumeister (1986) colorfully described it:
Many psychologists had spent their lives and staked their careers on theories about inner motives. They were less than delighted to be told that their theories were egregiously mistaken, that they had overlooked a (or even the) main cause. They could not dismiss self-presentation, but they did not have to like it. Self-presentation grew up as an all-purpose alternative explanation for many other theories. It was greeted and treated like a rude bastard relative at a family gathering (p. vi).
Finally, although researchers interested in the topic approached self-presentation scientifically, discussion of self-presentational strategies often sounded too much like the how-to-manipulate-others vein of “pop psychology.” Many viewed impression management as an inherently applied topic more appropriately studied by politicians, advertisers, and business executives than by psychologists.
Interest in Self-Presentation Spreads
Over time, however, interest in self-presentation became more widespread. Initially, research focused primarily on identifying factors that affect the kinds of impressions people try to convey. In early studies, researchers studied variables such as the effects of status, interpersonal goals, expected interaction, other people’s evaluations, and social feedback on people’s self-presentations. Soon afterwards, however, researchers began to apply self-presentational perspectives to the study of other psychological phenomena, thereby demonstrating that a great deal of behavior is affected by people’s concerns with what other people think of them. One of the first examples of the application of self-presentational concepts to other areas examined how hospitalised schizophrenics manage their impressions to appear either more or less mentally disturbed depending on the immediate social context (Braginsky, Braginsky, & Ring, 1969); we’ll examine this fascinating line of work in detail in Chapter 6.
During the 1970s, researchers began to offer self-presentational explanations of many behaviors. For example, James Tedeschi and his students proposed that many behaviors that were originally explained as reactions to cognitive dissonance may actually reflect self-presentational strategies (Tedeschi, Schlenker, & Bonoma, 1971). Self-presentational perspectives were also applied to understanding aspects of aggression, helping, conformity, attribution, resource allocation, group decision-making processes, task performance, voting, exercise behavior, and leadership. More recently, self-presentational explanations have also been offered for an array of emotional and behavioral problems such as social anxiety, shyness, depression, hypochondriasis, anorexia, and underachievement. With the application of self-presentational perspectives to the study of psychological problems, interest in self-presentation spread into clinical and counseling psychology (Leary & Miller, 1986).
Over time, evidence for the viability of self-presentational explanations accumulated. Study after study showed that behavior was affected by people’s desires for others to perceive them in particular ways. Furthermore, such findings were obtained for a wide variety of behaviors that spanned much of the content not only of social psychology, but of other areas of psychology as well. By the mid-1980s, it was difficult to find an interpersonal behavior in which self-presentation was not occasionally involved (Baumeister, 1982a).
Along the way, the self-presentational perspective was expanded in such a way that it became more useful and palatable to a larger number of behavioral researchers. In his book, Impression Management, and other writings, Barry Schlenker (1980, 1985; Schlenker & Weigold, 1992) showed that self-presentation involves far more than attempts to gain approval and, thus, was applicable to understanding a great deal more about interpersonal behavior than simply how people get others to like them. As researchers began to apply self-presentational explanations to real-world problems, many people began to realize that it was not just a laboratory curiosity, but a potent human motive that pervades everyday life. Recent applications of self-presentational approaches to business and organizational settings have further demonstrated their usefulness (Giacalone & Rosenfeld, 1989, 1991).
Self-Presentation
Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior
Mark R. Leary
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