Basking in Reflected Glory

 Value of Desired Goals

 Most theories of motivation assert that motivation increases as a function of the value or importance of desired goals (Beck, 1983). I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you that people are more motivated to try to attain things that they view as valuable in one sense or another. This is also true of impression-motivation. Given that people think their impressions are relevant to the attainment of certain goals, they will be more motivated to impression-manage the more valuable or important the goal they wish to attain. Several factors affect the value of people’s goals. 

Availability of Resources

 In economic systems, the value of something typically increases as it becomes more scarce, and a similar principle operates in social life. As a result, impression motivation is higher when resources are scarce. You can see this easily if you imagine being interviewed for a job; in which case would you be most concerned about the impressions you make—a job for which only one other applicant was being interviewed or one for which the company was interviewing 15 people? A study by Pandey and Rastagi (1979) showed that people were more likely to ingratiate a job interviewer as competition for the job became more fierce. Similarly, I suspect that impression management to potential romantic partners increases as the pool of potential partners gets smaller. 

Characteristics of the Target

 If you’re like most people, you are probably more likely to impression manage when dealing with people who possess desirable characteristics, and this seems to be true of virtually any characteristic you might imagine. Who are you most likely to want to impress: An attractive person or an unattractive one? A person who is intelligent and competent, or one who is not very bright? A socially skilled person or a socially inept one? Someone who is likable or unlikable? Those of high status or those of low status? An individual with a pleasing personality or an individual with the personality of a planaria? Studies show that people are more likely to manage their impressions when interacting with those who are physically attractive or otherwise socially desirable (Forsyth, Riess, & Schlenker, 1977; Mori et al., 1987; Shaw & Wagner, 1975; Zanna & Pack, 1975). 

 This may be because we value the reactions of people with desirable characteristics more highly than those of less desirable people; put simply, their reactions are more valuable. For one thing, we often assume that attractive, powerful, competent, and high status people are harder to impress. Thus, when we do make a desired impression and receive affirming feedback, we feel better about it. 

 In addition, people with socially desirable attributes are often in the position to mediate important outcomes that we desire. Overall, bright, attractive, skilled, and personable people are more likely to be in positions of power and authority than stupid, unattractive, unskilled, and unpersonable ones. 

The Value of Approval

 Given that people often impression-manage to enhance others’ evaluations of them and to get social approval, we would expect people who particularly need approval or fear disapproval from others to be more motivated to manage their impressions. Because people who have recently suffered a blow to either their self-esteem or to their esteem in others’ eyes value approval more highly, failure, rejection, and embarrassment increase people’s desire for social approval and, thus, their motive to impression manage (Miller & Leary, 1992). In some cases, a person who has been publicly embarrassed in front of one person may be motivated to convey a particularly positive impression in front of someone else (Apsler, 1975). 

Although our need for approval varies across situations, some people are characteristically more concerned about receiving approval and avoiding disapproval. People who score high in fear of negative evaluation worry more about others’ evaluations of them, score higher on measures of approval-seeking, and are more concerned about making good impressions on others (Gregorich, Kemple, & Leary, 1986; Leary, 1980, 1983a; Leary, Barnes, & Griebel, 1986; Watson & Friend, 1969). Similarly, people who score high in need for approval (Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Paulhus, 1984, 1991) are generally more motivated to control how others see them than people who are low on this trait (Dies, 1970; Jones & Tager, 1972; Leary, 1983c; Millham & Kellogg, 1980; Schneider & Turkat, 1975). 

 People who are high in fear of negative evaluation and need for approva1 tend to have higher impression motivation because they value approval more highly than people who are low on these dimensions. Because they value it more highly, they are more motivated to behave in ways that will gain approval and avoid disapproval, including self-presentation. People high in fear of negative evaluation, for example, work harder on tasks when they believe that hard work will gain them explicit approval (Watson & Friend, 1969). They also are more likely than lows to offer excuses when the possibility of negative evaluation exists (Leary et al., 1986). 

Discrepancy between Desired and Current Image

 The third factor that motivates self-presentation involves the degree of discrepancy that exists between the image one would like others to have of oneself (the desired image) and the image that others appear to hold (the current image). As long as people think they are making the kind of impression they want to make, impression-motivation should be minimal. However, to the degree that people become aware that others are not forming the impressions of them they would like, they will be motivated to manage their impressions to convey the desired images. 

 As a result, people who have made undesired impressions are particularly motivated to impression-manage. In some experiments, subjects have been led to think they failed on an important task or have been embarrassed in front of others. Both failure and embarrassment increase impression-motivation as people try to repair the damage they sustained to their social images (Apsler, 1975; Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Baumgardner, Lake, & Arkin, 1985; Brown, 1968, 1970; Brown & Garland, 1971; Leary & Schlenker, 1980; Modigliani, 1971; Schlenker, 1975; Schneider, 1969). 

 People who perceive a discrepancy between their desired and current images use a variety of self-presentational tactics in their attempts to reduce the discrepancy. For example, they may stress other positive attributes (Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Schneider, 1969) or make self-serving attributions for the events that damaged their images to begin with (Baumgardner et al., 1985; Frey, 1978; Weary & Arkin, 1981). They are also more likely to do favors for others to show what nice people they are (Apsler, 1975) and to associate themselves with other successful people (Cialdini & Richardson, 1980), hoping to “bask in reflected glory.” 

Nonconscious Self-Presentation

 People are not always aware of their motives for doing things. Although we can usually give reasons why we did this or that, the reasons we give may or may not reflect the true causes of our behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). As a result, people’s behaviors are sometimes affected by self-presentational motives even though they are not consciously thinking about others’ impressions at the time and even though they may that entered into their behavior at all. 

 First, some self-presentational behaviors are performed so regularly that they become mindless habits. Although the behavior may have begun because the person consciously wanted to create a certain impression, the person now performs the behavior without consciously thinking about its self-presentational roots. For example, why do you comb your hair? Obviously, there is little reason rather than to make a better impression on other people. Yet, I doubt that you consciously think, “I’d better comb my hair so I’ll look okay today.” Similarly, we are so used to conveying positive, socially desirable impressions of ourselves that we often do so mindlessly, without consciously thinking about our self-presentational goals in doing so. 

 A second reason that people sometimes engage in self-presentational behaviors nonconsciously is that they are simply not consciously aware of the stimuli that are causing their behaviors. One experiment showed that how a subject presented himself or herself to a conversation partner clearly depended on how the conversation partner presented him- or herself: subjects who interacted with self-enhancing partners presented themselves more positively than subjects who interacted with modest partners. Yet, subjects seemed completely unaware that their own self-presentations had been influenced by those of their partners. In fact, subjects insisted that they would have presented themselves the same way in other situations as they did during the study. They seemed unaware of deliberately or strategically changing their self-presentations (Baumeister, Tice, & Hutton, 1989). Thus, people sometimes engage in self-presentational behaviors without being aware of doing so. 

**

Basking in Reflected Glory

 People want to be associated with those who are successful, powerful, attractive, popular, or otherwise esteemed in others’ eyes. By connecting themselves with those whom others admire, they can bask in reflected glory (BIRG). Sometimes, people tout their associations with noted others verbally, such as when they “drop names” or tell about their connections to movie stars, historical figures, or other famous people. Sometimes the linkages are quite loose, such as when a person recounts seeing a rock star on a New York City street or brags that a sports hero was born in his or her hometown. 

 At other times, people connect themselves to others symbolically. One common way in which people bask in reflected glory involves high-lighting their connection to successful athletic teams. By wearing team-identifying apparel, fans can associate themselves with successful teams. Of course, people wear team shirts and jackets for many different reasons. Yet, research shows that university students are more likely to wear apparel that identifies their school after the football team has won a game than after the team has lost. Furthermore, the larger the margin of victory, the more students are likely to wear school-identifying apparel (Cialdini, Borden, Thorne, Walker, Freeman, & Sloan, 1976). 

 Experimental research shows that people are more likely to tout their connections to successful others when their own public images have been threatened, and those others are successful in an area in which they themselves are deficient. They are far less likely to mention their connections to those who are deficient on the same dimensions as themselves (Cialdini et al., 1976; Cialdini & DeNicholas, 1989). 

 People also do the opposite of basking in reflected glory–they cut off reflected failure (CORF) by disassociating themselves from people of disrepute, particularly when the disreputable person’s reactions may reflect personally on them (Snyder, Higgins, & Stucky, 1983; Snyder, Lassegard, & Ford, 1986). My grandfather is the family genealogist, but I’ve always suspected that he only tells us about ancestors who were notable in some way; I have yet to hear about a single horse thief, murderer, or other reprobate in my family tree. Another common example of CORFing occurs after political elections. People who display candidates’ signs in their yards are more likely to take the sign down if the candidate they support loses the election than if their candidate wins (Bernhardt, 1993). Few people want to be publicly associated with a loser. 

 In an extreme case of CORFing, Giovanna Portapuglia, an Italian countess, was kept locked up in a room not much larger than a broom closet for nearly 50 years because her family wanted to preserve the family’s honor and dignity in the eyes of other people. When she was discovered by police in 1980, the 65-year-old woman was emaciated, mute, and mentally disturbed. The family decided to hide her from public view after an illness she had as a teenager left her “different” (“Countess was Chained,” 1980). 

BIRGing at the State and City Level

 People sometimes bask in reflected glory simply by mentioning that a famous person was born in, lived in, or was otherwise associated with their town. Occasionally, entire cities or states get in on the action as they try to bask in the reflected glory of their native sons and daughters. Most commonly, states and cities advertise the fact that a prominent person was born there–even though where famous people were born may have little to do with what they ultimately achieve. 

 I read recently that North and South Carolina have been arguing for over a century about whether Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, was born in their state. Jackson was born a few days after his mother left her home in North Carolina for her brother’s plantation in South Carolina, but experts disagree about precisely where she was when Andrew was bom. South Carolina claims that she made it to her brother’s home before the baby was bom, but North Carolina offers evidence that Andrew was born along the way in another uncle’s cabin in North Carolina The fact that North Carolina has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to strengthen its claim that Jackson was born there attests to the importance to the state’s image of being associated with a U.S. President (“Native Son?,” 1991). 

 Although both individuals and entities such as states and cities BIRG, there seems to be one difference. Individuals sometimes BIRG with well-known people regardless of whether the reason the person is well-known is for being good or bad. We seem to take nearly as much pleasure in telling others that a mass murderer lived on our street as a sports hero. In contrast, cities and states only advertise their connections with those whose claim to fame is socially desirable. For example, I doubt that New Orleans will ever erect a sign at the city limits proclaiming “Birthplace of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Self-Presentation

 Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior 

 Mark R. Leary

A Brief History of Self-Presentation Research

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

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

Goffman and the Sociological Approach

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

In the course of social life, people’s responses to one another are heavily based on these surface appearances. Contrary to the advice we receive, we do judge books (and people) by their covers. And, because of this, people often present images of themselves that affect others’ judgments and reactions. According to Goff nan, a full understanding of human behavior requires that we pay attention to these public images. His view was consistent with Cooley’s (1902) claim that “the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society” (p. 87).  For Goffman, people control how other people treat them by influencing others’ definition of the situation. They influence others’ definition of the situation by giving others the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with their objectives. “Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey” (Goffman, 1959, p. 4). 

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

 Goffman 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