what is digital self presentation

• Personality

Self-Presentation in the Digital World

Do traditional personality theories predict digital behaviour.

Posted August 31, 2021 | Reviewed by Chloe Williams

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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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2.3: Self-Presentation

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• Victoria Leonard
• College of the Canyons

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

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.  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.  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. 

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.
• 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-notableresume-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 SelfPresentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,”The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 217.
• “Style Me Hired,” accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.stylemehired.com .
• John J. Sosik, Bruce J. Avolio, and DongI. Jung, “Beneath the Mask: Examining the Relationship of SelfPresentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 217.
• 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 SelfPresentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 236

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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.

Key Words in Digital Sociology

The digital self.

When it comes to the presentation of self, the framework called dramaturgical analysis coined by Erving Goffman is worth a mention. Goffman employed the theatre as an analogy to illustrate the different facets of the self, which can be considered as an aggregation of roles that we playout for the different audiences in certain situations. In Goffman’s analogy we are ‘actors’ who ‘perform’ the self on the ‘front stage’ of social interaction, hoping to guide how our ‘audience’ (the other people in an interaction) see us through ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1990). Goffman (1990) argues that a person consciously and unconsciously performs the self while at the same time evaluating the meaning of their performance. He refers to Park (1950) who understands the person firstly as a mask. Park states: “It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role (. . .) It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves”(Park, 1950, p.249).

Zhao (2005) discusses digital self-construction and emphasises the role of online interactions. She argues that the digital self is formed without the influence of non-verbal feedback and traditional environmental factors. The existence of a “digital self” does not mean that the self is divided into physical and digital parts, but the emphasis is on the “E-Audience”. This “E-Audience” witnesses us on the ‘Front stage’ of the internet, like in the form of social media profiles, when we post and interact (Zhao, 2005).

Indeed, Bullingham & Vasconcelos (2013) find that we recreate our “offline” selves online, but that we ‘edit’ them. One form of this ‘editing’ is an embellishment by which users can dissimulate images or exaggerate events based on the existing situation, rather than construct a new identity (Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013). Another form is selectively choosing specific aspects of multiple offline selves and showcasing it to other audiences online. For example, on Instagram, we often only post the photos which make ourselves and our lifestyles look the best. It is a form of omission, and exaggeration when filters are used. With regards to Goffman’s dramaturgical analogy, this ‘editing’ of our online presentations could be seen as part of impression management for our “E-audience”. The strategies used to manage impressions, hence our interactions, are essential as they determine whether or not a relationship is established (Derlega, et al., 1987).

Additionally, personae adoption and external influences affect users to decide whether they fit a community or anonymizing identity (Boellstorff, 2008).  In contrast to personae adoption, another manifestation of presenting selves is recreating the offline selves online. Bullingham & Vasconcelos (2013) argue that we recreate our offline self online. For example, users may design their avatars as similar to their faces or use nicknames as their pseudonyms (Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013). Moreover, both phenomena can exist at the same time, presenting one’s ‘real self’ while creating new self on other platforms (Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013).

In this uncertain environment, users may come across dilemmas on how to accord authenticity and positive self (Greene, et al., 2006). As Suvi Uski argued, a successful self-presentation online requires elaboration to reduce conflict between the presentation of online self and offline self to reach uniformity as a single and consistent narrative (Uski, 2015).

Boellstorff, T., 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bullingham, L. & Vasconcelos, A. C., 2013. ‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities, Journal of Information Science, 39(1), pp. 101-112.

Derlega, V., Winstead, B., Wong, P. & Greenspan, M., 1987. Self-disclosure and relationship development: An attributional analysis. Interpersonal processes: New directions in communication research, 14(1987), pp. 172-187.

Goffman, I. (1990) The Presentation of the Self in Everyday LIfe. Penguin Books.

Goffman, E., 1982. ‘The Interaction Order: American Sociological Association’, American Sociological Review, 48(1983), pp. 1-17.

Greene, K., Derlega, V. & Mathews , A., 2006. Self-disclosure in personal relationships. Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships, Issue 2006, pp. 409-427.

Park, R. E. (1950) Race and Culture (Glencoe.|lll.: The Free Press), p. 249.

Uski, S., 2015. Self-presentation in social network services. Helsinki: Publications of the Department of Social Research.

Waggoner, Z., 2009. My avatar, my self: identity in video role-playing games. McFarland: Jefferson.

Zhao, Shanyang. (2005) “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others”, Symbolic Interaction, 28(3), pp. 387-405.

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Conceptions of Digital Self: Understanding Identity Formation, Performance and Online Social Reality

This dissertation aims to understand the complexities of human identity in the digital world by breaking it down into aspects of micro, meso and macro that correlate to identity formation, performative self and social reality respectively. Each element of the online milieu is looked at through the lens of traditional social theory, with suitable considerations to explicate whether the meaningfulness that we derive in the physical world can be ascribed to the digital. Ultimately, this dissertation sets the stage for future research by providing an initial step towards arguing that, comparatively, the digital world holds substantive meaning for people in the context of their identity, their interactions and the environment they perform within just as much as, if not more than, the physical self.

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The use of digital technologies in contemporary global society has brought about a genuine anthropological and anthropotechnical transformation of the individual, on three interconnected levels: 1) the level of everyday behaviour; 2) the level of cognitive processes; 3) the symbolic level. In this paper, I will analyse these transformations in relation to a specific phenomenon of digital technology which falls within the range of practices of the quantified self, namely the phenomenon of lifelogging. The phenomenon will be analysed on three levels: 1) Processes of subjectification. Why are such data collected? The purpose of lifelogging is no longer "self-knowledge" – as in the modern and contemporary philosophical and cultural tradition – but rather self-motivation and self-optimisation. In terms of processes of subjectification, these practices may be understood as digital technologies of the self, to quote Michel Foucault, which is to say as modes of controlling and transforming one’s self by acting upon one’s body. 2) Social recognition. The data collected are also shared on social media platforms in order to receive comments and feedback through which to reinforce the construction of self. Can we describe this virtual community as a digital form of social belonging? And what are the implications of this for traditional forms of social recognition? 3) Business. The phenomenon of lifelogging includes not just lifeloggers but also the developers of lifelogging apps, devices, and software. Lifelogs (i.e. databases about individual physical performances) are widespread in many fields, such as those of fitness, healthcare, and education. Given the highly integrated level of the phenomenon and the risks it entails (particularly in terms of privacy policies), a pressing need has emerged to fill a gap in academic knowledge by investigating lifelogging within the context of the global digital society.

The Digital Turn: User’s Practices and Cultural Transformations

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Digital Identities explores the ways technology and online media have infiltrated our daily lives, and how they shape and affect who we are, both online and off. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of theories and approaches examining how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations. This book investigates how these cultivated forms of identity have grown more complex with the increasing ubiquity of interactive, digital and networked media and communication, and how our perception of the self and cultural markers have changed. It details how digital users fashion not just a single online self-representation, but how they create different personas depending upon the digital platform, with whom they are communicating, and how they wish to perceive themselves, as well as how they have the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated online content. We have moved from making use of online communication as separate from other aspects of life to one in which digital media infiltrates and networks with almost all aspects of our everyday lives. Traces of our online identity are everywhere—social networking pages, blogs, Twitter, and more, all of which actively contribute to elements of our identity. our identities are always ‘on’ Digital Identities helps make sense of the implications for subjectivity and selfhood in an era of constant connectivity.

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Social networks have become popular communication and interaction environments recently. As digital environments, so as ecosystems, they have potential in terms of networked learning as they fulfill some roles such as mediating an environment for digital identity formation and providing social and emotional presence. Based on this phenomenon, the importance of identity formation as a sociological and psychological process was explained throughout this study. Following that, social networks as digital social ecosystems and learning environments in which self-actualization, self-presentation, and self-disclosure of the individuals were discussed and their necessity as well as their potential for social and emotional presence was explained to better understand social networks. Besides, social networks and “Facebook” as a case were examined. Within this perspective, the purpose of this study was to explore online social networks with an emphasis on learning; to put forward its educational premises; and to analyze digital identity formation, social presence, and emotional presence in social networks.

On 'being' online: insights on contemporary articulations of the relational self

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One of the growing research interests in media and Internet studies concerns how the self is constructed in the digital environment, while the complex relationship between the self and consumption continues to be of interest in consumer research. This thesis is an examination of relational being at the intersection of digital media and consumer culture. It takes a critical perspective to examine the conditions under which the contemporary self is constructed and how the self is articulated in digital contexts, and thus views the online as embedded in the offline. Rooted in social constructionism, the relational perspective sees the self as an intersection of multiple and shifting relations. The aim of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of self-construction in our media-saturated consumer society. The study examines bloggers and fans and their mediated consumption practices through the lens of the social imaginary. The empirical material is collected from social media sites, plus-sized fashion blogs and YouTube, and analysed in the discourse analytic tradition combined with digital ethnography. The findings of the empirical studies show how ‘aspiration’ is constructed in the imaginary, with two conflicting, yet mutually constitutive notions of ‘being yourself’ and ‘improving yourself’ being negotiated at the site of the self, in the relational flow of the Internet. The studies also discuss disenfranchisement and marginalisation as properties of relationships, and show how imaginaries, in offering a range of interpretative resources for the self, also provide opportunities for counter-discourses. The study makes several theoretical and methodological contributions: within media and Internet studies, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of the embeddedness of the digital and to the ongoing discussion of how the digital is shaping the self; within consumer research, to the theorisation of relational self in the contemporary consumer context. Treating imaginaries as semiotic systems allows us to see imaginaries as constructed terrains of aspirations with complex significations. Thus, as sources of relational tension, imaginaries can be seen as implicated in the positioning, even othering, of individuals. The study suggests that the self is a fluctuating process of various alignments and disalignments within the matrix of social, cultural, and economic forces, with momentary discursive and relational achievements translating into temporary and situated congruence with others.

The spread of social networking media on the Internet has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in today’s world. Furthermore, it has opened a plethora of philosophical problems. One such problem concerns the notion of personal identity. Social networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on, allow for powerful ways for one person to get connected with others in a variety of ways. The connection is always mediated by some kind of construction of “identity” which more or less represent the real person behind it. The construction is also known as an “avatar,” a term borrowed from ancient Indian mythology where gods assume the body of a mortal being (which can be either humans or non-human animals) in order to combat and defeat problems that beset the world. In social networking websites, such avatars are made possible through the use of images and texts that are related to the person through the means of email addresses and passwords. The use of avatars has raised many interesting conceptual and normative problems. First of all, it is always possible for one person to have more than one avatars. In fact this is a common practice. But if avatars represent the identity of persons (in the same way as a divine avatar ‘embodies’ a god in the ancient myths), then in the case of multiple avatars do these avatars all represent the person equally? One strong belief in personal identity is that a person should be unique, but what does the existence of multiple avatars tell us? Is this a case of a psychological or even a pathological condition? Another problem concerns how well an avatar reflects the actual personality of the person behind it. In the ancient myths, once a god adopts an avatar, such as when the god Vishnu assumes the body of a turtle, then he needs to move about like a turtle. But no one believes that Vishnu has actually become a turtle. Is this the same as modern avatars online? Or is it more the case that avatars tend to assume their own unique personalities which could diverse from that of the real person? The findings of the research are that there are no essential differences between the online and the “offline” selves; any problems that lie with the self in the offline world are still there in the online version. Personal identity, a difficult philosophical problem that seeks to account for the identity of a self or a person, is still a problem in the online world too. This has strong implications in understanding the online self and the use of avatars and attempts at constructing a self image in social networking sites. It shows that the two worlds are merging into one. This research, in short, aims at proposing a number of philosophical issues behind the construction of avatars or online identities on social networking media and propose that insights gained from the ancient wisdom of Buddhism could illuminate at least some of the perplexities behind the phenomena. As is well known, a key Buddhist teaching is that of the Non-Self, i.e., the self as we understand it, as the seat of personality, as the subject of thoughts, emotions, and so on, are in the last analysis nothing more than a construction. So Buddhism seems to say that there is as a matter of fact no real distinction between avatars and persons. But if that is the case (and I will try to present an argument showing why it is so), then a number of interesting questions emerge. The report will discuss these questions with the aim of trying to understand what is really happening with the situation of online identity through the social networking media.

International Journal of Psychological Studies

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Taking posting of personal events in pictures and text on Facebook as an example, the article discusses some mechanisms of production of the Self in a new form. Using the process of creating a constructed identity on a social media platform, the paper combines Jacques Lacan, Carl Rogers and Karen Horney in explaining psycho-socially how and why people create an imaginative version of themselves online. This digital version of their Self lives beyond the reality principle. The Self is produced in the digital according to specific needs and drives of its owner. The Other(s) (the audience) that consumes it, bring values and sense of worth by consuming it. The main claim the article makes is that as a result of the communication between the Self and its audience (the Other (s) in the digital), personal values about self-worth change. As a result, self-identification with the consuming audience leads to self-actualizing and glorifying. This sets up the process of creating an Ideal Image...

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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.

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

How to make a presentation interactive and exciting, 6 presentation skills and how to improve them, how to give a good presentation that captivates any audience, what is self-preservation 5 skills for achieving it, how self-knowledge builds success: self-awareness in the workplace, 8 clever hooks for presentations (with tips), developing psychological flexibility, self-management skills for a messy world, similar articles, how self-compassion strengthens resilience, what is self-efficacy definition and 7 ways to improve it, what is self-awareness and how to develop it, how to not be nervous for a presentation — 13 tips that work (really), what i didn't know before working with a coach: the power of reflection, manage your energy, not your time: how to work smarter and faster, 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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Digital hyperconnectivity and the self

• Published: 26 August 2020
• Volume 49 , pages 771–801, ( 2020 )

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• Rogers Brubaker 1  

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Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. In addition to recasting social interaction, culture, economics, and politics, it has profoundly transformed the self. It has created new ways of being and constructing a self, but also new ways of being constructed as a self from the outside, new ways of being configured, represented, and governed as a self by sociotechnical systems. Rather than analyze theories of the self, I focus on practices of the self, using this expression in a looser, more general sense than that used by Foucault. I begin by considering and reformulating two early lines of argument about the web as a medium for exploring and emancipating the self. Subsequent sections show how digital hyperconnectivity has engendered new ways of objectifying, quantifying, producing, and regulating the self—considered both as active, reflexive practices and as systemic, data- and algorithm-driven processes. I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of contemporary modes of governing the self and by underscoring the ways in which hyperconnectivity has colonized the territories of the self, conscripting the self into the service of techno-social systems.

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Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. An example of what Marcel Mauss ( 2002 , pp. 100–101) called a “total social fact,” it has transformed social interaction, culture, economics, politics, and the self. These transformations have long prehistories: digital connectivity goes back several decades, and electronic connectivity has a much longer history. But digital hyperconnectivity—the condition in which everyone is (potentially) connected to everyone, to an exponentially growing array of sensor-embedded things, and to an infinity of digital content, everywhere and all the time—is a relatively new phenomenon, consolidated only during the last decade. During this time, smartphone and social media use became nearly universal in the developed world. Footnote 1 The extraction, aggregation, and monetization of vast amounts of data from the traces of our digitally mediated activities; the great leaps in machine learning and artificial intelligence, trained on these new troves of data; the explosive growth of the “internet of things”; the hypertrophy of digital surveillance: these are all likewise phenomena of the past decade.

Digital hyperconnectivity has recast social relationships, lifting them out of the here and now, disciplining and re-formatting them, and infusing them with new obligations, new expectations, and new anxieties. It has transformed cultural practices and products, converting the whole of human culture into an endless stream of digital content, fed to us by personalized algorithms. It has revolutionized economic life, calling forth gigantic monopolies whose unprecedented power permeates every aspect of our lives. It has upended politics, eroding and fragmenting the public sphere; polarizing—and in some ways paralyzing—the citizenry; fomenting populist challenges to mediating institutions; and even, in some respects—contrary to expectations—strengthening rather than undermining authoritarian regimes. And it has permeated and colonized the self, reshaping our habits, our emotions, our ways of thinking, and drawing the self into the service of techno-social systems.

This article explores the last of these transformations: the ways in which digital hyperconnectivity has transformed the self. This is an enormous subject. Hyperconnectivity has retrained us, re-socialized us, reshaped our dispositions, altered the basic rhythms of our being in the world. It has inflected our emotions, modified our neurochemistry—and perhaps even rewired our brains. It has profoundly altered our experience of space and time. It has transformed the ways we think, the ways we feel, the ways we desire, the ways we remember, the ways we attend to the world and to one another. It has brought us into intimate relations with ever-more powerful, ever-more seductive devices. It has created new ways of knowing and imagining the self, new ways of seeing and assessing the self, new ways of presenting and performing the self. It has changed the ways we think about the self—and, more importantly, the ways we act upon the self. Digital hyperconnectivity, in sum, has created new ways of being and constructing a self, but it has also created new ways of being constructed as a self from the outside, new ways of being configured, represented, and governed as a self by sociotechnical systems.

Several traditions of social theory offer useful starting points for analyzing these transformations of the self. One rich tradition, from Charles Horton Cooley ( 1902 ) and George Herbert Mead ( 1934 ) through Erving Goffman ( 1956 , 1959 ) and beyond, understands the self as a thoroughly social phenomenon, formed and sustained in and through ongoing social interaction and performative enactment. How has digital hyperconnectivity transformed the social formation of the self? If we come to know the self—and indeed to form the self—by seeing it from the outside, from the point of view of others, how is this process affected by the shift to digitally mediated forms of interaction? How does the “looking glass self” posited by Cooley change when the mirror in which we see ourselves reflected is a digital one? What new forms are taken by the presentation of self—and the performative enactment and production of the self—in digital contexts? In what sense is the self not just a social but—increasingly—a sociotechnical phenomenon?

A second tradition, associated with Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, understands the self in the “post-traditional” social environment of late modernity as a “reflexive project,” for which the individual must assume responsibility. It is a project that requires continuous self-monitoring, critical self-interrogation, and ongoing self-making and remaking through choices “not only about how to act but who to be” (Giddens 1991 , pp. 14, 75, 81; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002 ). How has digital hyperconnectivity transformed this project? In what ways has it heightened the reflexivity of late modernity by generating new tools for self-monitoring, new forms of self-knowledge, and new styles of self-entrepreneurship? In what ways, conversely, might hyperconnectivity diminish reflexive self-making by enmeshing us in sociotechnical systems that nudge, manipulate, and discipline us and that automate individuality through data-driven forms of “personalization”?

A third tradition, inspired by the late work of Michel Foucault, likewise emphasizes reflexivity and active work on the self but focuses less on choice and more on practices or “technologies” of the self, “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being,” as a way of transforming themselves (Foucault 1988 , p. 18). What new “technologies of the self” and what new resources for the “care of the self” have emerged under digital hyperconnectivity? What is the relation between new technologies of the self and new technologies of power and domination enabled by hyperconnectivity?

I approach these questions obliquely rather than directly. Rather than analyze theories of the self, I focus on practices of the self. “Practices of the self,” to be sure, is a phrase associated with Foucault, but I use the expression in a looser, more general sense, in accordance with the broad “turn to practice” in social theory in recent decades (Schatzki et al. 2001 ). I begin by considering two early lines of argument about the web as a medium for exploring and emancipating the self. These arguments were initially developed in the 1990s, well before the era of hyperconnectivity, and their limitations soon became evident, but they can be reformulated in ways that speak to the present. Subsequent sections show how digital hyperconnectivity has engendered new ways of objectifying, quantifying, producing, and regulating the self—considered both as active, reflexive practices and as systemic, data- and algorithm-driven processes . I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of contemporary modes of governing the self and by underscoring the ways in which hyperconnectivity has colonized the territories of the self, conscripting the self into the service of techno-social systems.

Hyperconnectivity has transformed the self in complex and ambivalent ways, and I want to resist the lure of a simple narrative of decline: a story of the betrayal of the heady liberatory promises of the early days of the Web. The themes of exploration and emancipation remain as pertinent today as they were a quarter century ago, though they are themselves complex and ambivalent. And the new practices of objectifying, quantifying, producing, regulating, and governing the self are likewise complex and ambivalent: they can be construed in ways that highlight the active, reflexive moment or the systemic, cybernetic, disciplinary moment. I seek to remain sensitive throughout to this complexity and ambivalence.

Exploring the self

Digital connectivity has been seen—and celebrated—by some theorists as having enlarged the space of possibilities for selfhood. It has been characterized as a sociotechnical environment conducive to exploring and experimenting with the self and to emancipating the self from a series of constraints. In both respects connectivity has been understood as an empowering—or at least an expansive—ecology and technology of selfhood.

The themes of exploration and experimentation were first articulated a quarter century ago in discussions of virtual communities, chat rooms, and online role-playing games. In Sherry Turkle’s influential account, the mutual anonymity characteristic of these contexts allows people to adopt and enact digital personas of their own choosing, to “express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones” ( 1995 , p. 12). They can present and sustain their chosen selves—and those selves can be recognized and validated by others—without being constrained by the bodies they inhabit, the histories they incarnate, and the selves they enact offline. For avid participants, the interactional density of such virtual worlds can make them feel “more real than … real life” ( 1995 , p. 10).

The selves enacted in such anonymous online contexts relate variously to offline selves. Some participants explore parts of their selves that are seldom or never expressed in “real life.” Some present idealized versions of their offline selves. Some experiment with new identities—new gender or sexual identities, for example—as a way of gaining experience and confidence before coming out in real life (Turkle 2011 , p. 214). Some play with multiple online identities that may have little or no relation to offline selves.

Writing in the mid-1990s, Turkle gave particular attention to participants who cycled through multiple online personas, thereby sustaining several selves in parallel. This “cycling-through,” on Turkle’s account, was emblematic of a broader postmodern experience of self. Participants in multiple virtual worlds were “pioneers” whose “experience of constructing selves in cyberspace will become increasingly important” in a postmodern “culture of simulation” in which identity is “multiple, heterogeneous, and fragmented” (Turkle 1996 , p. 157).

Later critics have challenged Turkle’s extrapolation from the experience of such pioneers to the broader online experience. They have noted that role-playing gamers—disproportionately young, educated, technically sophisticated males—are not representative of the general online population. And role-playing games and virtual communities—though still an important niche for self-exploration—have become a much smaller part of the vast cosmos of online life (Robinson 2007 , pp. 94, 101–103; Tufekci 2013 , p. 36). More fundamentally, while anonymity remains important in certain regions of cyberspace, the entire ecosystem of digital hyperconnectivity turns increasingly on a vast infrastructure of identification. For most people, the online self is an extension of the offline self, not an alternative to it.

Yet even if experimentation and play with multiple virtual identities in contexts of mutual anonymity are less common than Turkle suggested, the web is more than ever an expansive space of self-exploration and self-formation—and not just for participants in virtual worlds, but for everyone. Surfing, searching, and lurking allow people to discover, explore, and find social support for a wide range of ways of being other than those available and sanctioned in their immediate family and social environment (Zhao 2005 , pp. 392–395). But digital hyperconnectivity not only enables the self to venture out virtually into the world; it brings the world into the self. If earlier forms of media, television in particular, had generated a “saturated self” (Gergen 1991 ), the web/social media/smartphone complex has generated a hyper-saturated self, inundating the self in a ceaseless and superabundant flow of “mediated experience” (Giddens 1991 ; Thompson 1995 , pp. 225ff) and “populating … the self [with] multiple and disparate potentials for being” (Gergen 1991 , p. 69, italics omitted).

Digital hyperconnectivity furnishes all of us—not only those who are more or less self-consciously exploring alternative ways of being—with an inexhaustible storehouse of “possible selves”: “individuals’ ideas of who they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming.” Possible selves often emerge directly from processes of social comparison: “what others are now, I could become” (Markus and Nurius 1986 , p. 954). By multiplying the occasions for social comparison, digital hyperconnectivity—and social media in particular—vastly enlarges the set of possible selves. This can be experienced as enriching, as widening the horizon of possible ways of being. But it can also be experienced as deeply unsettling. It may create a “virtual cacophony of potentials”: as we incorporate a diversifying set of others into the self, their disparate desires and ways of thinking become our own, pulling us in differing directions and providing us differing and conflicting criteria of self-evaluation (Gergen 1991 , pp. 68–73; the quotation is from p. 73). Here as elsewhere we see the ambivalence of abundance, enriching and enlarging the self on the one hand, but threatening to fragment, paralyze, or dissolve the self on the other.

Emancipating the self

Digital connectivity has been understood as a technology not only of exploration but of emancipation. The theme of emancipation, like that of exploration, emerged first in connection with virtual communities and role-playing games. Cyberutopian accounts celebrated emancipation from the fixities of the body and from social hierarchies based on differentially valued bodies. In a 1987 essay about The Well, the celebrated early virtual community founded by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, Howard Rheingold wrote that “because we cannot see one another, we are unable to form prejudices about others before we read what they have to say: Race, gender, age, national origin and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public” (reprinted in Rheingold 2008 ). In most early role-playing games and chat rooms, to be sure, people did identify by gender—and were often required to do so. But the fact that the online identification was not anchored in or guaranteed by the offline body seemed to some commentators to have the potential to disrupt the gender order more broadly (Dickel 1995 ). Race received less attention than gender, but an early essay by cultural theorist Lisa Nakamura argued that the practice of “perform[ing] [oneself] solely through writing” can “enable a thought-provoking detachment of race from the body” and call into question “the essentialness of race as a category”; it has “the power to turn the theatricality [of role-playing games] into a truly innovative form of play, rather than a tired reiteration and reinstatement of the old hierarchies.” Footnote 2

The early optimism about the possibilities of emancipation from hierarchies and inequalities grounded in differentiated bodies was short-lived. Footnote 3 Role-playing games have turned out to be spaces where gender norms and hierarchies are more often reproduced—sometimes in exaggerated form—than transcended (Bell 2001 , pp. 124–125). And as Nakamura ( 2002 , pp. xi, 31) herself emphasized, “the internet is a place where race happens”: even in chat spaces, when “physical bodies are hidden from other users, race has a way of asserting its presence in the language users employ, in the kinds of identities they construct, and in the ways they depict themselves online, both through language and through graphic images.” This disenchantment came long before digital hyperconnectivity became the perfect petri dish for breeding the racism and misogyny of the alt-right.

Yet if hyperconnectivity has failed to emancipate or uncouple the self from the body, it has nonetheless contributed powerfully—for better or worse—to emancipating the self from family and local community. While emancipation from the body is a postmodernist dream, emancipation from family and community is a core narrative of sociological modernity: the long-running story of the progressive erosion of familial and communal control over the means of socialization in an increasingly literate, mobile, urban, and media-saturated world. Digital hyperconnectivity accelerates and intensifies this long-term development (Hampton and Wellman 2018 , p. 647).

The emancipatory potential of digital hyperconnectivity can be seen most clearly from the perspective of those to whom it poses the most acute threat. It is no accident that conservative religious communities—communities that seek to maintain their boundaries and reproduce their traditions in a secular world and to shield their members from the corrosive influences of the environing society and culture—regard the unfiltered internet and smartphone as particularly dangerous. As anthropologist Ayala Fader ( 2017b ) has shown in her study of ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in New York, the threat is not just that dangerous material like pornography becomes hyper-accessible; it is more insidious and ultimately deeper.

The danger is partly cognitive: for a community that prizes focus and memory in the study of Torah, the loss of capacity for concentration, as one rabbi put it, is a bigger threat to the holiness of the Jewish nation “than all the shmuts [filth] on the Internet” (Fader 2017b , p. 193). It is partly the seductive appeal of the smartphone, which disrupts the affective economy of the community. As the rabbi remarked, “Too many of us … love their iPhones. If they weren’t embarrassed they would kiss them” (Fader 2017b , p. 194). But perhaps most dangerous is the social aspect of digital connectivity: the opportunities it affords the questioning, doubting individual, struggling with forbidden thoughts, to share doubts, questions, and struggles under the cloak of anonymity with like-minded others (Fader 2017b , p. 193), instead of struggling privately with one’s own shame. As the rabbi complained, an internet forum allows such a person to “instantly [feel] that he has a support group. There are other people there who feel like him. Er iz dortn a normaler mentsh [There, in the forum, he is a normal guy]” (p. 194).

So while the smartphone—as a private anywhere/anytime portal to the internet—is a powerfully individualizing technology that circumvents the dense network of communal surveillance that is so central to the reproduction of ultra-orthodox or other conservative religious communities (Deutsch 2009 , p. 8), it (and hyperconnectivity more generally) can also be powerfully collectivizing , calling into being counter-publics and alternative communities. In the case studied by Fader, a counter-public coalesced around an interlinked set of anonymous blogs written by doubters that gave voice to widely shared but previously unarticulated concerns in the ultra-orthodox community, including criticisms of the community leadership. Footnote 4 In both individualizing and collectivizing ways, hyperconnectivity works to emancipate the self from family and local community.

As a collectivizing technology, hyperconnectivity helps overcome what social psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance”—a situation in which people mistakenly believe that their own beliefs differ from those of everyone else in the community. The overcoming of pluralistic ignorance is central to the ways in which hyperconnectivity has transformed politics (Tufekci 2017 , pp. 25–26). But it is also important to the social shaping of selves.

In situations of pluralistic ignorance, individuals who feel like misfits, outsiders, or deviants—like those harboring doubts in ultra-orthodox communities—remain isolated in that feeling, wrongly believing their own situations to be unique. By revealing the existence of like-minded others—and enabling low-risk, low-cost communication with them—hyperconnectivity overcomes pluralistic ignorance and its attendant social isolation. It provides social support for alternative definitions of the self and alternative understandings of community. Self-understandings that are unrecognized, medicalized, or stigmatized in family and local community settings can be publicly articulated, recognized, and validated online as legitimate forms of selfhood. What are experienced as privatized personal failings in the context of family or local community can be re-articulated and reclaimed as publicly legitimated ways of being. Hyperconnectivity is thus a powerful technology of self-recognition and self-validation that provides alternative paths to the social formation of the self.

When we think of emancipation, we almost invariably think first of emancipation from the constraints of conservative family and community milieux. But digital connectivity also provides resources for escaping the constraints of liberal or progressive family, community, or institutional milieux. The digital precincts in which precursors to the alt-right emerged, for example—most notably the anonymous image-based message board 4chan (Nagle 2017 )—can be understood as emancipatory in this purely descriptive sense. They too helped overcome pluralistic ignorance and provided social support for an alternative style of selfhood, centered on provocation, transgression, and trolling.

The emancipatory potential—or threat—of hyperconnectivity stands out in sharpest relief in sociologically “extreme” cases like that of conservative religious communities. But hyperconnectivity contributes to the emancipation of the self in a much more general, pervasive, and mundane way. The possibilities it affords for “anonymous sociality, critique, and exploration” (Fader 2017b , p. 187) redistribute control over the means of socialization from family, community, and local institutions—whose once-comprehensive socializing powers have of course already been greatly attenuated in the cultural and social structural contexts of modernity—to a variety of mediated networks and communities and to the “infosphere” (Floridi 2014 ) in general. This cannot help but have an emancipatory working—provided, once again, that one understands that term in a purely descriptive sense.

The lines of argument I have considered in this and the preceding section converge in extending a classical story of sociological modernity. Footnote 5 They see digital connectivity as furthering and intensifying the long-run process of disembedding individuals from the unchosen, obligatory communities into which they were born and re-embedding them in looser, less encompassing and binding networks and communities of their own choosing. Footnote 6 Through this disembedding and re-embedding, the self becomes, more than ever, in Giddens’s terms, a reflexive project for which the individual must take responsibility.

This updated and extended version of a familiar story of individualization is compelling in many respects. But it remains too classically individualist. It does not capture what is specific about the sociotechnical dimensions of self-formation in an ecology of digital hyperconnectivity. It does not take account of the ways we construct—or co-construct with others—digital versions of ourselves. It does not take account of ubiquitous mobile connectivity, big data, pervasive quantification, algorithmic selfhood, or the powerful sociotechnical ensembles we call social media platforms. It does not take account of the disciplining or colonization of the self by those sociotechnical systems. The sections that follow seek to address these aspects of self-formation in an age of hyperconnectivity.

Objectifying the self

In George Herbert Mead’s rich and subtle account of the social formation of the self in and through social interaction, a key moment involves seeing oneself from the outside. This requires “taking the role of the other.” Children learn to do so in rudimentary ways in play, in somewhat more complex ways in structured games, and in considerably more elaborate ways when they take the view not only of particular others but of what Mead called the “generalized other.” It is by taking the role of the other that one becomes an object to oneself. Such self-objectification is the basis for self-consciousness, and it is central to the process of becoming a self (Mead 1934 ).

Mead’s account of the social formation of the self remains foundational to social psychology and to the symbolic interactionist tradition in sociology. Yet even as literature on objectification and self-objectification burgeoned in psychology and sociology, it sharply narrowed in focus. Objectification came to refer prevailingly to the ways in which girls and women are seen, assessed, represented, and treated – by men, by the media, and ultimately by themselves—as actually or potentially sexualized objects, reducible to their sexualized bodies. And self-objectification came to designate the process through which girls and women turn the objectifying gaze back on themselves, internalize its standards of appraisal, and come to understand, evaluate, and act on themselves and their bodies in accordance with those standards.

Digital hyperconnectivity has of course given massive new impetus to this sexualizing form of objectification and self-objectification. It has ubiquitized pornography; multiplied new forms of self-objectifying digital sexuality, both commercial and non-commercial; and created new modes of dating like Tinder and Grindr that are premised on visual self-objectification, inviting the user to “swipe right” or “swipe left” to signal interest or the lack thereof in response to a photograph. And even as the sexualizing, objectifying gaze has become more promiscuous, no longer aimed exclusively at women by heterosexual men, it remains profoundly gendered in its effects on bodily self-image, feelings of self-worth, and the like (Mascheroni et al. 2015 ; Bell et al. 2018 ).

But hyperconnectivity is a technology of objectification and self-objectification in a much deeper and more general sense. It has radically transformed the ways in which objects exist in the world and the ways in which one becomes an object to oneself, to others, and to suprahuman knowledge systems. In so doing, it has created an entirely new techno-social infrastructure of selfhood, an entirely new ecology within which selves are formed and reformed. Footnote 7

We live in a world that is densely populated with digital objects. These objects do not lead a segregated existence in a digital world that is sharply distinct from the off-line material world; rather, the digital and material are inextricably interwoven. Footnote 8 We no longer “go online” as if moving into another realm; we are always connected, not so much “online” as “onlife,” to use philosopher Richard Floridi’s ( 2014 , p. 43) phrase. We routinely encounter, engage, consume, create, modify, share, and interact with digital objects in the course of our everyday embodied lives.

The onlife world creates and multiplies new ways of objectifying the self—new ways of constructing and experiencing the self as an object. Most obviously, we objectify ourselves when we deliberately construct social media profiles, when we take and circulate “selfies,” or when we post on social media. More subtly, we continuously objectify ourselves—without any self-conscious awareness of doing so—in the course of our everyday lives. As life moves online, it leaves an ever-expanding trail of digital objects in its wake. Digitally mediated action and interaction are in this sense intrinsically objectifying . Footnote 9 Every text, every email, every click of our browsing history, every app-mediated action, every sensor-recorded data point, every action and interaction on social media, even the most trivial “like” or retweet, leaves digital residues, many of which persist as digital objects. These make us visible to ourselves and others in new ways, allowing us to see ourselves and our actions—and of course the selves and actions of others—as objects. (They also, of course, allow us to be constructed and treated as objects by algorithms deployed by platforms and data brokers in the service of efforts to know who we are and to affect how we behave. The digital residues used for these purposes—which dwarf those that we ourselves use—remain invisible to us: they are fed into vast and opaque systems of data aggregation and analysis that enable the algorithmic objectification of the self—a theme I return to in the next section.)

Verbal and visual practices of representing the self as an object are of course in no way new. Writing is among other things a way of objectifying the self and seeing the self from the outside. The diary, in particular, has been analyzed by historians as a powerful technique of “writing the self” (Heehs 2013 ), as has the letter (Foucault 1983 ). And self-portraiture has a long history (Hall 2014 ). In an ecology of digital hyperconnectivity, however, self-objectification is democratized, routinized, and banalized; it becomes an unmarked and unremarked quotidian habit of the many, woven into the fabric of everyday life, rather than a marked and distinctive practice of the few. And this chronically objectifying and self-objectifying nature of everyday social life profoundly shapes the contemporary experience of selfhood.

We routinely create objectified digital representations of the self, sometimes through deliberate, self-conscious self-work, sometimes unselfconsciously; and once these representations are in place, we see the self from the outside, as an object. The self that we see is a composite object: it includes not only the digital self-representations and self-traces that we have created, deliberately or unselfconsciously, but also others’ digitally mediated responses, which are durably conjoined with our self-representations. When we look in the digital mirror, we see not only an image of ourselves, but also an image of ourselves as others see us. Footnote 10 When we see the self as a digital object, we see ourselves in a double refraction: as we have constructed our own digital selves, and as others have co-constructed our digital selves through their enduringly objectified digital responses.

In this way, the viewpoint of the other is built into the digital self. In the ecology of digital hyperconnectivity, we take the view of the other not, as on Mead’s account, by imaginatively displacing ourselves, but by directly inspecting others’ objectified responses (their comments, likes, favorites, retweets, and so on) to our objectified digital selves. Since these digital micro-validations, micro-affirmations, and micro-recognitions are enduring rather than evanescent, taking the point of view of the other does not require a cognitive shift; the point of view of the other is already there, encoded in the digital self. And since these micro-affirmations are aggregated and counted by social media platforms, it is not only the point of view of particular others that is encoded in the digital self; it is also the point of view of a generalized other. Unlike Mead’s generalized other, the digital generalized other is a quantified other ; its view of the digital self is reduced to a string of numbers, attached both to the global digital self (numbers of friends, followers, and so on) and to its particular objectified manifestations (numbers of comments, likes, and favorites on the material we post or share).

In a final step in digital self-objectification, we turn the gaze of the digital generalized other back on ourselves. Footnote 11 As the literature on sexual objectification specifies, we internalize the objectifying gaze of the other and come to evaluate ourselves and orient our actions in accordance with its standards of appraisal. But the internalized objectifying gaze falls not only on our bodies, and it is not specifically sexualizing; it extends to every manifestation of our digital being.

The internalization of the external gaze alters our experience of the world, offline as well as online. As curators of the ever-changing exhibition of the digital self, we are ever alert to what might have digital value—to what might be effectively shareable or postable—as measured by the standards of the digital generalized other. Footnote 12 By internalizing the gaze of the digital generalized other, we not only assess ourselves and our digital performances after the fact according to its standards; we also assess our prospective digital performances before the fact by anticipating the judgment of the quantified other.

Digital hyperconnectivity thus proliferates objectified representations of the self; it creates new ways of seeing ourselves from the point of view of others; and it generalizes, democratizes, routinizes, and quantifies self-objectification by holding up to us a ubiquitous digital mirror that turns the digital gaze back on ourselves. I turn now to a closer examination of quantification.

Quantifying the self

In 2010, Gary Wolf published a New York Times op-ed on “The Data-Driven Life,” extolling the new possibilities for seeking “self-knowledge through numbers.” This and an article in Wired the previous year (Wolf 2009 ) have been seen as the founding statements of what has come to be known as the “quantified self movement,” a movement that promises to overcome the “vagaries of intuition” in the name of the objectivity of data by privileging numbers over words, instrumentation over introspection, the measurable over the ineffable, real-time feedback over long-term exploration, and the surfaces of the body over the depths of the soul.

But the “quantified self” is less a movement than a moment, less an ideological project than an everyday practice. The vanguard of enthusiasts who have participated in the quantified self “community” or “movement” are a small minority in relation to those who have been drawn in less self-conscious, less overtly experimental ways into practices of self-quantification. Footnote 13 The “quantified self” is often taken to evoke the vanguard; but I take it to evoke the broader sociocultural moment in which practices of knowing the self through numbers have become a routine and taken-for-granted part of everyday life—and have emerged as the “authorized way to pursue self-knowledge in the networked society” (Horning 2012a ). Footnote 14

The past decade has seen the proliferation of self-tracking devices and apps that use sensors to record a wide range of both biometric and behavioral data and prompt users to log other data at regular intervals. Biometric data include pulse, respiration, steps taken, sleep patterns, alcohol concentration, glucose levels, galvanic skin response, even penile thrusts. Behavioral data include patterns of speed, acceleration, braking, and other driving data; frequency, duration, and quality of social interaction (measured by recording and analyzing speech); and, of course, things like screen time, app use, and websites visited. User-supplied data include reports on feelings, pain, energy levels, activities, spending, and the consumption of food, vitamins, fluids, alcohol, caffeine, and drugs. Together, these data allow users to monitor systematically exercise, sleep, diet, sex, mood, productivity, and a variety of other dimensions of health and well-being, on the premise that the knowledge thus gained can be enlisted in the service of fitness, health, happiness, and productivity. Footnote 15

Disciplined forms of self-monitoring are of course not new (Rettberg 2014 , chapter 1; Cardell 2018 ). Regimens of systematic self-scrutiny have been central to various religious traditions—and to their secularized descendants. Benjamin Franklin ( 1904 , pp. 188–195) famously developed a system for the “daily examination” of his conduct, employing a grid in which each column represented a day of the week and each row one of thirteen virtues and “marking every evening the faults of the day” by placing a black spot—or occasionally two spots—in every category in which he found his conduct wanting. And it was already a century ago that the widespread availability of the bathroom scale made the tracking of weight a routine practice (Crawford et al. 2015 ).

The affordances of digital hyperconnectivity, however, have led to the proliferation of forms of quantitative self-tracking. Innovations in sensor technology have vastly expanded the range of bodily and behavioral processes that can be tracked conveniently, unobtrusively, and inexpensively. Ubiquitous, always-connected mobile devices and cloud computing allow user input whenever prompted and give users access to their data anywhere, anytime. Apps convert qualitative into quantitative data, identify correlations, and generate convenient visualizations of trends and relationships. And built-in integration with social media platforms allows self-tracking data to be readily shared with others, thereby harnessing an additional, social layer of motivation, also evident in the “gamification” of self-tracking. Footnote 16

A decade ago, quantified self-tracking was for enthusiasts; in the near future, it may be for everyone. Whatever its value to the individual, self-tracking data are potentially valuable to insurance companies (who can set rates for auto, health, or life insurance based on individualized rather than aggregate data and penalize those unwilling to share personal data); to employers (who can encourage or even require employees to use fitness-monitoring apps in an effort to improve productivity, reduce health-care costs, or discipline workers); Footnote 17 and to retailers (who can use such data to target customers more effectively). Beyond their potential monetary value, tracking data are of increasing interest to schools, some of which are requiring students to participate in health or fitness-tracking programs (or at least making it difficult to opt out of such programs). Footnote 18 Such “pushed” or “imposed” forms of self-tracking of course raise broader questions about surveillance creep, privacy, and autonomy. Footnote 19

But the self is increasingly quantified in ways that go well beyond self-tracking. In an ecology of communication dominated by social media platforms, all selves become quantified selves, nourished on a steady diet of numbers. Footnote 20 Quantification is built into the basic architecture of the platforms. Not only are numbers of followers featured prominently on social media platforms, but all activity on platforms—comments, likes, shares, favorites, retweets, even simple views—is relentlessly quantified and fed back to the user in a string of numbers. On Facebook, for example, every post (and even every comment on a post) is quantified—in a manner visible to the poster and to everyone else who sees the post—by the number of people who have “reacted” to it as well as the number who have shared or commented on it. Footnote 21

Quantification—whenever unlike objects are involved—involves commensuration: the establishment of a common metric that allows unlike qualities to be compared as differing quantities (Espeland and Stevens 1998 ). Facebook’s “like” button—introduced within the site in 2009 and made available to external websites in 2010 as a way of integrating external content with Facebook—is an instrument of commensuration on a vast scale. Its exceptionally widespread implementation—the button appears on more than 8 million external websites—and the adoption of similar buttons on other major platforms create a universally recognized metric of popularity: in effect a form of social currency that powers the “like economy.” Footnote 22

The massive work of commensuration performed by Facebook and other social media platforms enables and invites comparison on a double axis. It facilitates comparison across our own performances: we cannot help being attuned, consciously or unconsciously, to which of our posts—which of our online performances of self—are comparatively successful, and which fall flat. That chronic attunement reshapes our self-understandings and self-appraisals, leading us to alter our performances in order to engage more effectively with our audiences (Jurgenson 2012 ). Commensuration also facilitates comparison across people: the social media environment makes us chronically aware of how we measure up against others; it renders visible our comparative visibility—or invisibility. The social media existence is an existence-for-others; we exist only insofar as others engage with our digital selves. The relentlessly quantifying ecosystem of social media takes the measure of our digital selves and places that measure in an inescapably comparative—and implicitly competitive—frame.

Numbers are not only a means of knowing the self; they are a means of governing the self. Social media metrics do not simply reflect the world; they alter our relation to the world. They are “an engine, not a camera,” as Donald Mackenzie ( 2006 ) said of financial models. Continuous quantification, like gamification, deepens our engagement with social media, spurring us to seek to improve our numbers (Grosser 2014 ). No matter how good those numbers, they can always be better: as in the case of other positional goods, defined by relative rather than absolute value (Hirsch 1978 ), abundance is always at the same time experienced as scarcity. The quantified self is therefore a restless and insatiable self.

The numbers I have been discussing so far enter into our experience in conspicuously visible ways: prominently displayed by our self-tracking reports and social media feeds, the numbers are inescapable. But these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg. Digital hyperconnectivity quantifies the self just as consequentially in opaque and invisible ways, through data-analytic and computational procedures that construct digital representations or “data doubles” of the self. Footnote 23 We are tracked and quantified by others—by sociotechnical systems—much more thoroughly and relentlessly than we could ever hope to track and quantify ourselves.

These digital representations are made of data, assembled from the ever-expanding digital trail we leave behind us (Gillespie 2014 , pp. 173–174; Harcourt 2015 ; Cheney-Lippold 2017 ; Zuboff 2019 , especially chapter 9). Even without computational procedures, the data trail contains a wealth of stunningly detailed information about our lives, including for example increasingly precise and comprehensive geolocation data. But beyond this, the data support a wide range of probabilistic inferences about who we are and how we are likely to behave. These inferences touch on the most intimate aspects of the self: personality traits, emotional states, sexual orientation, and the like. Footnote 24 Increasingly powerful machine learning algorithms, trained on ever larger and richer data sets, have dramatically increased the accuracy of these inferences. A 2018 paper, for example, showed that a facial recognition algorithm could accurately distinguish between gay and heterosexual men 81% of the time, based on a single facial image, or 91% of the time, based on five images per person (Wang and Kosinski 2018 ). Footnote 25

Knowing the self through numbers is therefore not only a reflexive practice , a way in which the self is known from within; it is a computational process , a way in which the self is known from without. The external, computational knowledge of the self includes many things that we have forgotten and other things that we have never known. The sociotechnical system that assembles the data and makes inferences from it may have a fuller and more accurate representation of us than we have of ourselves. Footnote 26

Producing the self

Erving Goffman’s classic work on the presentation and performative enactment of the self in social interaction has been a rich source of inspiration for work on the digital presentation and performance of the self. While retaining Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective and drawing on many of his key concepts—the distinction between “front stage” and “back stage” regions, for example, and the distinction between deliberately “giving” and unintentionally “giving off” information—researchers have highlighted certain distinctive features of self-presentation in online contexts. Footnote 27 They have emphasized the ways in which asynchronous text-based communication, for example, facilitates the self-conscious “editing” of one’s self-presentation and even allows for collaborative forms of self-presentation that enlist the help of others in real time (Turkle 2011 ; Schwarz 2011 ; Bullingham and Vasconcelos 2013 ). They have noted that the absence of the body-behavioral cues available in face-to-face communication not only makes it harder to assess others’ self-presentations, but also makes it harder to grasp how others see us (Zhao 2005 ). They have observed that the anonymity characteristic of some online forums can allow for greater intimacy and self-disclosure, but may also license extreme incivility (Suler 2004 ). And they have underscored the difficulties of practicing what Goffman called “audience segregation” on social media sites that “flatten multiple audiences into one” and thereby generate “context collapse” (Marwick and Boyd 2011a ).

But digital hyperconnectivity not only introduces new ways to present the self; it affords new opportunities—and diffuses more widely a sense of obligation—to produce the self. The idea of becoming an “entrepreneur of oneself,” as Foucault put it, has long been central to neoliberalism (Foucault 2008 , p. 226, translation modified; McGuigan 2014 ). And the cultural obligation to work on the self, to treat the self as a reflexive project, has a longer history still; it can be construed as central to modernity. But ideals of self-work and self-production have found a vast new field of application—and taken on a new inflection—in an ecology of communication dominated by social media platforms.

In the 1980s and 1990s, prevailing accounts of the enterprising self stressed the proactive acquisition of human capital and the continuous retraining of the self to conform to the needs of a flexiblized post-Fordist economy, with its dynamically evolving division of labor (Pongratz and Voß 2003 ; du Gay 1996 , pp. 180–184; Rose 1998 , chapter 7). The value of the enterprising self, on these accounts, would find its ultimate measure in the labor market. In the landscape of digital hyperconnectivity, self-entrepreneurship comes to mean not only improving the corporeal self as a factor of production , adapted to competition in the labor market, but producing the digital self as an object of consumption , adapted to competition for attention in the social media market. In this context, the value of the enterprising self finds its ultimate measure in the size of its audience. The digital self is no longer simply indexical, pointing to the “real” self that it represents; it acquires a value and significance of its own as a self to be consumed by others, as part of their ongoing stream of media consumption. Footnote 28 The digital self thus no longer simply represents the neoliberal “self of value”; it becomes a self of value in its own right.

Writing about the fitness field, Jennifer Smith Maguire ( 2008 , pp. 59–60) notes that the body, unlike the psyche, is “immediately available for inspection, augmentation, and refinement” and is therefore “the ultimate site for the production and display of the self.” Yet the social media landscape makes digital representations of the self “immediately available for inspection, augmentation, and refinement” as well, indeed on a potentially much broader scale. Hyperconnectivity arguably makes the digital self, as much as the material body, “the ultimate site for the production and display of the self” (though the body is of course central to the production and display of the digital self).

The paradigmatic self-entrepreneur of the digital age, practiced in the arts of producing the self, is the figure of the social media “influencer” or lifestyle blogger (Hearn and Schoenhoff 2016 ; Khamis et al. 2017 ; Duffy 2017 ; McRae 2017 ). The influencer is a person who has cultivated a large social media following not by virtue of pre-existing celebrity status but by producing and enacting a digital self that succeeds in engaging—and being consumed by—his or (more often) her followers. This self-production often involves the display, discussion, and endorsement of commercial products, from which the successful influencer can derive perks, sponsorships, and, with a large enough following, perhaps even a significant income. Influencers are thus involved in promoting and selling two kinds of products: the products they promote , and the product they directly produce for the immediate consumption of their followers: their digital self. They acquire their influence by producing and marketing themselves; the fortunate few can then monetize their influence by promoting others’ products. Footnote 29

Social media influencers are an instance of the more general phenomenon of digital celebrity (Marwick 2010 , 2016 ). In the ecology of hyperconnectivity, celebrity is profoundly transformed. Hyperconnectivity democratizes and universalizes celebrity; it makes new forms of micro-celebrity seemingly accessible to all (Driessens 2015 ). Anyone, it seems, can become “Facebook famous” or “Instafamous,” if only for Warhol’s proverbial 15 minutes. Social media provides everyone with a quantifiable and potentially expandable audience. This makes everyone—as consumers but also as producers—party to the phenomenon of digital celebrity.

As media studies scholar Alice Marwick ( 2010 , pp. 223–226) has emphasized, digital micro-celebrity is not defined by numbers of followers. It is more fruitfully understood as a particular set of practices—an audience-oriented, self-publicizing way of thinking and acting—than as a particular degree of popularity. Understood in this way, micro-celebrity can be practiced by anyone, regardless of the size of their following; it indeed “becomes the default pose for much social media” (Marwick 2010 , p. 287). In an age of digital hyperconnectivity, we are all potentially micro-celebrities.

The obligation to produce a digital self suitable for others’ consumption—and capable of engaging and sustaining their attention in a media-saturated landscape—places a premium on developing and expressing a distinctive digital identity, a distinctive “brand.” The idea of self-branding was first popularized in the late 1990s, well before the emergence of social media. Footnote 30 But it thrives in the ecology of digital hyperconnectivity. The pervasive quantification of visibility and popularity, the sheer superabundance of consumable content, and the intensified competition for attention compel us all, in some measure, to individualize the digital self. Even those who would be appalled by the idea of self-branding experience a structural pressure to produce a distinctive digital self-for-others, on pain of invisibility.

Digital hyperconnectivity is in this respect a technology of individualization . But individualism is a deeply ambiguous notion. Footnote 31 The self-branding, self-marketing and self-production practices required of the enterprising self in an ecology of digital hyperconnectivity might seem to mark the apotheosis of a narrowly market-oriented and competitive utilitarian individualism. Yet this style of self-work draws at the same time on a more expansive ideal of expressive individualism and personal authenticity that has long been integrated into the circuits of consumerist capitalism and into neoliberal understandings of selfhood (Frank 1997 ; McGuigan 2009 ; Genz 2015 ).

The effectiveness of influencer marketing and lifestyle blogging, for example, depends crucially on the influencer or blogger being seen by her followers as being true to her authentic self. Aspiring influencers are therefore obliged to work hard at producing and performing authenticity. Yet precisely the evidence of such work can expose them to the charge of inauthenticity: performances of authenticity must be self-concealing to be effective. Footnote 32 There is no way out of this double bind of authenticity. Footnote 33

It is not only would-be influencers who find themselves cross-pressured by the ideals of individuality and authenticity in an ecology of digital hyperconnectivity. Social media is a gigantic engine of communication, a technology of communicative superabundance. Footnote 34 No matter how much we communicate, how much we share, how much we express ourselves, we are always prompted to communicate more. And we are expected to have something distinctive to say, something that will express our individuality and authenticity. Yet even as social media heightens the demand for individuality and authenticity, it makes them more difficult to achieve.

This is partly because of the sheer superabundance of communication: in such a crowded communicative field, it is at once imperative and nearly impossible to be distinctive. It is also because the materials at our disposal to produce and perform a distinctive self are entirely generic: the bits of objectified culture that we re-circulate; the generic photos; the familiar moves and gestures; the standardized formats and prescribed sequences made available by social media platforms. Footnote 35 And lingering cultural understandings of the authentic self as unfiltered and unmediated cast chronic doubt on the authenticity of digital selves constructed through curatorial practices and through the mediation of complex sociotechnical systems. In these conditions, as social media theorist Rob Horning has observed, “‘becoming oneself’ has turned into a crappy job — a compulsory low-paying, low-skill job” that leaves one feeling chronically underappreciated and beset by doubts about one’s own authenticity (Horning 2012c ; see also Horning 2012b and Horning 2014 ).

In a context in which the cultural obligation to produce the self as a distinctive, authentic individual is increasingly difficult to fulfill, the burdensome work of individualizing the self is turned over increasingly to algorithms, which after all know us and our uniqueness better than we know ourselves. The “personalization” that is promised on every front—personalized recommendation engines of all sorts, personalized shopping (along with personalized prices), personalized health, personalized news, personalized advertisements, personalized learning, personalized music—depends on the ever-more-refined algorithmic constructions of individuality. Footnote 36 As it becomes more difficult to produce our digital selves as unique individuals, we are increasingly being produced as unique individuals from the outside. Hyperconnectivity is thus a technology of algorithmic individualization. Individuality is redefined from a cultural practice and reflexive project to an algorithmic process and from an irreducibly qualitative to a purely quantitative phenomenon. Our unique selfhood is no longer something for which we are wholly responsible; it is algorithmically guaranteed.

Algorithmic individuality reflects back to us a version of ourselves constructed not—as in Charles Horton Cooley’s understanding of the “looking glass self”—from the way others see us but from our own data: our past choices, our habits, our likes, our ratings. This establishes a second feedback loop, distinct from the loop described earlier in which we alter our own offline and online behavior in response to, and in anticipation of, the quantified response of the network to our online presence and performance. This new feedback loop connects us not to others but to our past selves. The algorithms train themselves on our data, and they then train us by feeding us more of what they determine we like. They help us to remain the selves that we have revealed ourselves to be. They map out a space of our own for us to inhabit and discourage us from leaving that comfortable algorithmic home.

The task of becoming and being a self in late modernity—whether the self-monitoring, self-authoring, reflexive self described by Anthony Giddens or the enterprising, choosing, psychologically aware, self-governing self analyzed in the broadly Foucauldian account of Nikolas Rose—has been portrayed in the literature as an arduous one. Outsourcing individuation to algorithms takes some of the pressure off this task; it allows us to settle into the snug fit of an algorithmically tailored self. Algorithmic individuality combines the comforts of familiarity and the pleasures of self-recognition with the convenience of automation, while relieving us of some of the burdens and stresses of choice.

Regulating the self

Digital hyperconnectivity has transformed not only the ways in which we come to know ourselves and work on ourselves, the ways in which we present ourselves and produce ourselves, but also the ways in which we regulate ourselves. It affords new resources—and prompts the development of new practices—for shifting or modulating our moods, monitoring and managing bodily states and processes, altering energy levels, inducing pleasurable experiences, relaxing body and mind, providing solace, and producing feelings of belonging. It generates new ways of conceptualizing, measuring, and pursuing well-being and new ways of dealing—effectively or ineffectively—with stress, pain, anxiety, loneliness, insomnia, depression, anger, and other unwanted physiological and emotional states (Turkle 2011 , 2015 ). Having discussed new forms of measuring, monitoring, and tracking bodily and mental processes under the heading of quantifying the self, I turn here to new ways of intervening in and regulating these processes, focusing especially on the regulation of mood and emotion.

Music has long served as a medium of self-regulation in this sense. As Tia DeNora has shown, music is a powerful “technology of self,” a medium for the “construction and maintenance of mood, memory, and identity.” It is “an accomplice in attaining, enhancing and maintaining desired states of feeling and bodily energy (such as relaxation); it is a vehicle [for moving] out of dispreferred states (such as stress or fatigue). It is a resource for modulating and structuring the parameters of aesthetic agency—feeling, motivation, desire, comportment, action style, energy.” It gives people “a medium in which to work through moods” (DeNora 2000 , pp. 46, 47, 53, 56).

DeNora’s Music in Everyday Life appeared in 2000, two decades after the Walkman first popularized mobile sonic bubbles, but before hyperconnectivity revolutionized the experience of listening to music (the first MP3 players had recently come on the market). The importance of music as a technology of physiological and emotional self-regulation has only increased since then. And much of what DeNora has to say about music holds equally, mutatis mutandis, for video and other forms of audio or audio-visual materials more generally.

Consider, for example, the large and enthusiastic community of YouTubers devoted to producing and sharing videos that can trigger an “autonomous sensory meridian response” (ASMR). The term refers to a pleasurable tingling sensation on the skin, accompanied by feelings of mild euphoria, relaxation, and well-being. ASMR videos generally involve whispered communication and other quiet sounds that invite attentive listening. They are often recorded with a binaural microphone and listened to with headphones, which creates an immersive experience of proximity. The video component, generally secondary to the audio, shows a single person, often in extreme close-up, and often performing a repetitive task or playing—slowly and deliberately—the role of someone offering a personal service like a haircut or a medical check-up. ASMR videos enact routines of personal care and create a distinctive kind of “distant intimacy” (Andersen 2015 ). Most participants report using ASMR videos to help them relax and to deal with stress, anxiety, and insomnia; some find they temporarily alleviate depression and chronic pain (Barratt and Davis 2015 ). The popularity of ASMR videos has sparked interest in their possible therapeutic use, though evidence of their efficacy remains fragmentary and largely anecdotal.

Whether or not ASMR eventually receives experimental validation, ASMR users have developed a novel form of self-regulation that is at once emblematic of and strikingly antithetical to the socio-emotional world of digital hyperconnectivity. On the one hand, the entire ASMR phenomenon depends on the affordances of Web 2.0 and, more specifically, on the culture and the sociotechnical infrastructure of video sharing platforms like YouTube and Reddit (Gallagher 2016 ). ASMR videos became a “thing”—they acquired sociological reality—by virtue of being discovered, repurposed, named, collected, discussed, theorized, labeled, assessed, shared, rated, and produced in the distinctive environment of these platforms. They produce their impression of immediacy and intimacy at a digitally mediated double remove in both time and space (Andersen 2015 , p. 691). On the other hand, ASMR videos regulate the self in a manner that stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing physiological, cognitive, and emotional rhythms of digital hyperconnectivity. They slow down the self rather than speeding it up; they soothe rather than stimulate; they offer quiet immersion rather than clamoring for attention. Indeed the ills to which they respond—stress, anxiety, and insomnia—have all arguably been exacerbated by the rhythms of hyperconnectivity. ASMR videos are a technology of self-regulation that responds to characteristic ways in which the self is dysregulated , physiologically and emotionally, in an ecology of hyperconnectivity.

ASMR videos are part of a much broader phenomenon of the use of online resources—music, videos, games, social media feeds, and so on—for emotional and physiological self-regulation. The psychological literature has seen such practices of mood regulation through online resources as symptoms of “problematic Internet use.” Footnote 37 Yet while some ways of using online resources to regulate moods may indeed be problematic, this is surely far too narrow a view. In a context of hyperconnectivity, we all draw on online resources to modulate, alter, or regulate our moods and emotions. In addition to searching for information and advice on mood regulation and seeking out the immediate gratifications of online interaction, we use the affective powers of the immense wealth of online audio and visual materials, available anywhere and anytime, to regulate our energy levels, alter our moods, cheer ourselves up, calm ourselves down, relieve stress or anxiety, distract ourselves, or simply stave off boredom.

The superabundance of such online resources, however, poses its own problems. Spotify may have “the right music for every mood and occasion” (Spotify n.d. ) amidst its tens of millions of tracks, but how do we find it? And how do we find the right video for the right moment amidst the cornucopia of YouTube? The problem of choice in the face of superabundant content, of course, goes well beyond practices of self-regulation; it is central to the workings of culture in an ecology of digital hyperconnectivity. Here I want simply to note that what is experienced as a practical problem by individuals—finding the right music or video for physical and emotional self-regulation—is increasingly understood as an opportunity by businesses (Drott 2018a , 2018b ).

As moods become increasingly “identifiable, addressable and manipulable” (Lynden 2018 ) through big data, connective platforms, and new forms of surveillance, regulating the self becomes not only something we do, but something that that can be done to us. The regulation of the self shifts from a self-reflexive individual practice to an algorithmically driven process. In the not too distant future, we will no longer face the burden of having to choose the “right music [or the right video] for every mood and moment”: sensors and algorithms will detect our moods at every moment and deliver the right music or video without our having to search for it. Footnote 38 The regulation of the self will be outsourced to the sociotechnical systems in which we are enmeshed.

Automated mood-detecting and mood-regulating systems may still be in the future, but we are already being regulated—and dysregulated—by sociotechnical systems. These systems have altered the basic rhythms of our everyday being, including our attention habits, our sleep patterns (Billari et al. 2018 ; Robb 2019 ), and our experience of time. They have even altered our neurophysiology, deploying dopamine-dispensing notifications that cue possible future social rewards and thereby engage our “seeking” behavior and keep us checking our social media feeds and coming back for more. Footnote 39 The language of “addiction” remains controversial, both in the medical community and in broader public discussion (Pies 2009 ). But there is no doubt that social media platforms have been brilliantly engineered, in ways that exploit knowledge of our psychological vulnerabilities, to capture and sustain our attention. Nor is there any doubt that digital hyperconnectivity has been massively dysregulating for many people, disrupting everyday habits; exacerbating stress, anxiety, and low self-esteem; and interfering in a major way with work lives, social relationships, and the pursuit of goals.

Governing the self

Running through the four preceding sections—on objectifying, quantifying, producing, and regulating the self—is a tension between reflexive practices and algorithmic processes . A reflexive practice is something one does to oneself; the self is both subject and object. An algorithmic process constructs the self from the outside; the self is merely the object, not the subject. The tension is between objectifying oneself, quantifying oneself, producing oneself, and regulating oneself on the one hand and being algorithmically objectified, quantified, produced, and regulated on the other. It is a tension between being an agent and being the recipient and target—and ultimately the product—of processes organized from the outside. It is a tension, in short, between governing oneself and being governed—and in significant ways constituted—by complex sociotechnical systems.

This corresponds roughly to the distinction drawn by the late Foucault between “technologies of the self” and “technologies of power.” As noted at the beginning of this article, the former “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being,” as a way of transforming themselves; the latter “determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination.” Footnote 40 Having perhaps, he acknowledged, “insisted too much,” in earlier work, on the latter (Foucault 1988 , p. 19), Foucault devoted more attention in his late work to the former, to the “ascetical practices” that he characterized as involving an “exercise of self on self” or the “labor of self on self” (Foucault 1987 , pp. 113, 117).

Digital hyperconnectivity has generated an array of new technologies of self in this sense. These include exploring publicly unexpressed aspects of one’s identity in anonymous online environments; blogging as a new form of public “self-writing”; lifelogging and self-tracking, insofar as these are oriented not simply to self-knowledge but to self-optimization; and posting curated content on social media sites. Footnote 41 These and other practices entail new forms of active work on the self by the self. In the complementary analytical idiom of Giddens, they contribute to making the self, more than ever, a reflexive project.

Beyond introducing specific new technologies of the self, digital hyperconnectivity has expanded the ways in which people actively govern themselves in a more general way that deepens and intensifies neoliberal forms of governmentality. In Miller and Rose’s loosely Foucauldian account of what they prefer to call “advanced liberal” strategies of government, individuals are construed as “subjects of responsibility, autonomy, and choice” (Miller and Rose 2008 , p. 212). Such actively responsible, self-enterprising individuals are “not merely ‘free to choose’, but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice” (Rose 1999b , p. 87, italics in the original). They can be governed “at a distance,” “governed through their freedom to choose” (Miller and Rose 2008 , p. 82).

Miller and Rose were writing in the 1990s, well before the era of digital hyperconnectivity. In the course of the last decade, however, the affinities between hyperconnectivity and neoliberal governmentality have come into sharp relief. I discussed above one such affinity: the ways in which hyperconnectivity has enabled—and rendered quasi-obligatory—new forms of self-entrepreneurship, new ways of producing a digital “self of value.” Here I want to highlight another: the ways in which hyperconnectivity encourages people to “understand and enact their lives in terms of choices” and gives powerful infrastructural backing to the neoliberal project of governing people “through their freedom to choose” and “responsibilizing” individuals as choosers.

In a context in which the empire of individual choice expands and choice is increasingly valorized in every domain—not just in the core domains of consumer choice but in the domains of health, lifestyle, relationships, schooling, public services, financial planning, risk management, insurance, and so on—hyperconnectivity provides an unprecedentedly powerful and pervasive infrastructure for governing through choices and for training people to be responsible choosers. This infrastructure makes it easy for systems of governance to require choices; to record the choices that are made; to track individuals’ behavior; and to reward them for making what are deemed responsible choices. Footnote 42 The infrastructure also makes it easy to generate and disseminate information (including quantitative indicators) about items in choice sets, thereby enabling individuals, in principle, to make “informed choices.” Hyperconnectivity provides, in short, a training apparatus that seems admirably well suited to engineering neoliberal selves.

Yet even as digital hyperconnectivity proliferates the occasions for choice, requires us to be governed through the choices we make, and expands the range of choice in many contexts by connecting everyone to everyone and everything and bringing a universe of infinite digital possibility to our fingertips, it at the same enframes and enmeshes choice in systems that preconfigure, circumscribe, formalize, gamify, routinize, attenuate, and reduce choice. The proliferation of choice goes hand in hand with the disciplining and in some contexts the emptying out of choice. Footnote 43 Devices like drop-down menus, for example, pre-specify the acceptable alternatives. Personalized algorithmic filters shape the information we see and thereby often limit the range of what we can effectively or easily choose. Footnote 44 And choice architectures—including simple features like defaults--“nudge” people more or less strongly in particular directions. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, the apostles of nudging, argue that the “libertarian paternalism” involved in nudging individuals toward “welfare-promoting” choices allows “public and private institutions to influence behavior while also respecting freedom of choice” (Sunstein and Thaler 2003 , p. 1159). But the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll rightly underscores the tension between nudging and the neoliberal vision of governing people through their freedom to choose. Nudging, as she notes, “both presupposes and pushes against freedom…. [it] falls somewhere between enterprise and submission, responsibility and discipline” (Schüll 2016 , p. 328). Footnote 45

At the limit, digital hyperconnectivity pushes not just toward circumscribing, simplifying, and regulating choice but toward making choice unnecessary. We see this in “autonomous search,” which uses location data and data on our habits to prompt us, unbidden, for a nearby bar, restaurant, pharmacy, store, etc. We see it in marketing strategies of “proactive personalization” or “anticipatory design,” which promise “flow not friction” and “convenience not choice” (Quito 2015 ). We see it in navigation software, which relieves us of making routing choices while driving. We see it in personalized subscription boxes that send clothes, food, or other goods based on user data, relieving the individual of any decision (except perhaps to return an unwanted item). Footnote 46 We see it in “smart home” services that reorder supplies automatically or otherwise relieve the resident of making choices about routine functioning or maintenance. We see it in YouTube’s “Next Up” feature, which cues up a new video whenever the last one finishes .

Here we glimpse the contours of what might be called a post-neoliberal self . If the neoliberal self is governed through its choices, the post-neoliberal self is governed through its data. If the neoliberal self is constructed as a “subject of responsibility, autonomy, and choice,” the post-neoliberal self is constructed as an object of knowledge, prediction, and control. If the neoliberal self is produced in significant part through psychological expertise and through various forms of “governing the soul” (Rose 1999a ), the post-neoliberal self is produced through techno-social engineering (Frischmann and Selinger 2018 ) and through the direct governing of behavior. If the neoliberal self is self-steering, the post-neoliberal self is steered by algorithmic systems. If the neoliberal self is self-activated, self-reflexive, and entrepreneurial, the post-neoliberal self is conditioned to respond to increasingly pervasive and finely calibrated stimuli (Zuboff 2019 , chapter 10). Returning to Foucault’s distinction, if the neoliberal self is formed through technologies of the self, the post-neoliberal self is formed through technologies of power, “which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination.”

Of course this contrast is overdrawn. The full-blown post-neoliberal self is a figure on the horizon, not—yet—a familiar figure in our midst. For the time being, the empire of choice continues to expand, citizens of “advanced liberal” societies continue to be called upon to be self-activating and self-reflexive, and we continue to be governed for the most part at a distance, through the choices we make.

Still, digital hyperconnectivity has enmeshed individuals in an ever-tighter web of algorithmic processes that objectify, quantify, produce, regulate, and govern the self. These processes do not simply work on pre-constituted selves from the outside; they enter into the constitution of the self, reshaping its internal workings—its desires, its rhythms, its habits of attention, its modes of self-regulation. The ongoing social formation of the self is increasingly mediated by this web of algorithmic processes.

The sociotechnical, algorithmically mediated processes of self-formation are part of a larger political economy of the self. This is in some respects a familiar story. At least since the beginning of the advertising age, powerful economic actors have sought to reach inside the self, to engineer new desires and fantasies, to create new habits, to foster new styles, to alter ways of thinking and acting, to invent new ways of capturing and reorganizing our attention. For over half a century, these efforts have prompted concerns about new technologies of persuasion (Nelson 2008 ).

So tech firms’ efforts to reach inside the self are certainly not new. But their power to do so—grounded in the extraordinarily rich data they have extracted and in the unparalleled immediacy and intimacy of our relations with our devices—is unprecedented in scale, scope, and intensity (Zuboff 2019 ). It is a power less of persuasion than of insinuation. It is a power not only to capture and retain our attention but to regulate—and disrupt—our rhythms, to discern and alter our moods, to reorganize our neurophysiology by dispensing dopamine hits on a schedule sufficiently unpredictable to keep us engaged, all on the basis of astonishingly comprehensive and fine-grained knowledge. Earlier efforts to reach inside the self—having at their disposal only the most fragmentary data and the crudest instruments of knowledge—were feeble by comparison. The self remained a largely unknown territory, and advertising was driven chiefly by conjecture. But the conquest of that unknown territory has advanced rapidly during the last decade, raising the prospect of a thoroughgoing colonization of the self.

The metaphor of colonization has several pertinent implications. Footnote 47 It suggests that the self is governed, increasingly, from the outside: a government of the self, but neither by the self nor for the self. It suggests that the self is vulnerable, with only weak defenses against the superior technology—and seductive blandishments—of the colonizing powers. It suggests that the territories of the self constitute a new frontier for the extraction of resources—vast troves of hitherto unexploited behavioral data—by external powers (Zuboff 2019 ; Couldry and Mejias 2019 ). It suggests that the self has been disciplined by those powers, drawn into their administrative routines, habituated into yielding data to them, and conscripted into providing labor for them. It suggests that the self has been rendered legible, docile, predictable, and tractable, subject to neo-behaviorist regimes of behavior modification (Zuboff 2019 ). It suggests a form of rule that disguises itself as a service, one that purports simply to give us what we want and to “improve the user experience.” It suggests—if one shifts from extractive to settlement colonies and stretches the metaphor a bit further—the populating of the self with wave after wave of new inhabitants, the flooding of the self with endless streams of “content” coming from the outside, and the consequent transformation of individual and social imaginaries. It suggests, in line with the notion of self-colonization, the enlisting of the self—the seduced, willing self—in its own colonization.

The “colonization of the self” is a potent and troubling metaphor. But it does not of course capture the whole story of the transformations of the self by digital hyperconnectivity. As a “total social fact,” hyperconnectivity contains many internal tensions; its affordances are complex and ambivalent. Earlier themes of exploring and emancipating the self, reformulated to address the present conjuncture, remain pertinent. And a variety of new practices of the self—new ways of knowing the self and acting on the self in an environment of digital hyperconnectivity—enrich the sense in which the late modern self is a reflexive project. Yet the reflexive practices of self-making have been increasingly overlaid by algorithmic process that objectify, quantify, produce, regulate, and govern the self from the outside. This trajectory is sobering indeed.

In the United States, the share of the population over age 14 with a smartphone soared from a mere 11% at the end of 2008 to 75% just six years later ( https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/US-Smartphone-Penetration-Surpassed-80-Percent-in-2016 ). Regular Facebook users amounted to only 14% of the US population at the end of 2008, but just three years later they made up more than half the population (and of course a much higher fraction among younger people): https://www.nickburcher.com/2012/01/facebook-usage-statistics-by-country.html .

Nakamura’s 1995 essay is reprinted in Nakamura ( 2002 ; the quotations are from pp. 35 and 49).

Marwick ( 2005 , pp. 37–47) provides a useful overview of “critical cyberculture studies” and its challenge to the notion of cyberspace as intrinsically liberatory.

On counter-publics in the ultra-orthodox case, see Fader ( 2017a ).

To be sure, some formulations of these arguments have a postmodern inflection (Gergen 1991 ; Turkle 1995 ). But there is no hard and fast line between characterizations of postmodernity and characterizations of contemporary modernity. Many aspects of the alleged postmodern condition are treated by theorists like Giddens ( 1991 ) or Beck et al. ( 1994 ) as aspects of “late,” “high,” or “reflexive” modernity.

For a clear account of such disembedding and re-embedding that criticizes as sociologically unfounded laments about the alleged contribution of digital connectivity to the “destruction of community,” see Rainie and Wellman ( 2012 , especially pp. 117–131).

My concern here is not with the initial formation of the self in early childhood—although digital technologies of objectification figure increasingly in that process as well—but rather with the ongoing process of the social shaping and reshaping of selves.

For a critique of “digital dualism,” see Jurgenson ( 2013 ).

The formulation in the text is a bit too strong. Objectification is not a necessary corollary of digitally mediated interaction. But it is the default option, thanks to the cheap and declining cost of preserving digital traces and the various actual or ostensible benefits of doing so. Some platforms do not objectify users’ interactions. Photos sent by Snapchat, for example, disappear after 10 seconds (though users can alter this default setting). But even when communication is designed to be evanescent to users, as with Snapchat, the business model of the platform depends on turning digital traces into monetizable data-objects.

Many platforms allow users to see their digital selves from the outside, as others see them.

On the digital gaze, see Floridi ( 2014 , pp. 73–74).

On new modes of alertness and attentiveness to experiences that might be converted into enduring, shareable digital objects, see Schwarz ( 2012 ). Similarly, on the “Facebook eye,” which leads us to experience things, even when we are not connected, with a view to their postability and likely interest to an audience, see Jurgenson ( 2012 ) and Jurgenson ( 2019 , pp. 12, 27–28, 36–38).

On “everyday self-trackers,” see Didžiokaitė et al. ( 2018 ). On enthusiastic participants in the quantified self community, see Nafus and Sherman ( 2014 ); Sharon ( 2017 ); Schüll ( 2019 ). These ethnographic studies offer nuanced accounts of participants’ tentative, exploratory, and often self-critical stance toward self-tracking and the data it yields.

For an early critique of the limits of self-knowledge through numbers, see Morozov ( 2013 , chapter 7).

The wide range of contemporary self-tracking devices and practices is described in Lupton ( 2016 , pp. 16–30); see also Mau ( 2019 , chapter 6).

On the converging technological and social developments that have enabled self-tracking to flourish, see Wolf ( 2010 ). On sharing, social support, and gamification, see Lupton ( 2016 , p. 23).

Hull and Pasquale ( 2018 , p. 191) suggest that corporate wellness programs, including those that involve self-tracking technologies, do not reduce employers’ costs but rather discipline and condition workers.

Oral Roberts University, for example, has required entering students to purchase and wear a Fitbit tracker since 2016 (Frischman and Selinger 2018 , pp. 17–18).

On “pushed” and “imposed” self-tracking, see Lupton ( 2016 :, pp. 121–125). On “surveillance creep” in connection with health tracking, see Frischman and (Selinger 2018 , pp. 20–28). For a nuanced discussion of the issue of autonomy, see Sharon ( 2017 ).

Quantification is of course a much more general tendency that goes well beyond social media platforms (Muller 2018 ; Mau 2019 ).

Artist Benjmain Grosser created the “Facebook Demetricator” ( https://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/ ) in response to the pervasiveness of Facebook’s metrics (Grosser 2014 ).

On the “like economy” and the role of the like button in reorganizing the fabric of the web, see Gerlitz and Helmond ( 2013 ). On the contribution of the like button to platform interoperability and the creation of an integrated platform ecosystem, see Van Dijck ( 2013 , chapters 3, 8). For the figure of 8 million external websites, see Stimson ( 2018 ).

The term “data doubles” was introduced by Haggerty and Ericson ( 2000 ) in their account, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, of “surveillant assemblages”; it has subsequently been widely adopted.

The pioneering paper of Kosinski et al. ( 2013 , p. 5802) showed that Facebook likes could be used “to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.” See also Tufekci ( 2014 ).

For a recent review of the ways in which “machines can infer information about our psychological traits or mental states by observing samples of our behaviour gathered from our online activities,” see Burr and Cristianini ( 2019 ).

Of course it is also the case that such external knowledge may be riddled with errors.

On the distinction between “giving” and unintentionally “giving off” information, see Goffman ( 1959 , p. 2); on front and backstage regions, see ibid., (pp. 106–140).

On the practices of constructing a digital self to be consumed by others, see Marwick and Boyd ( 2011b , p. 140); Ibrahim ( 2018 , chapter 3).

The vast majority of aspiring influencers, of course, do not strike it rich. See Duffy ( 2017 ) for a study of the “aspirational labor” of fashion and style bloggers as “a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love ” (p. 4, italics in the original).

Although self-branding was popularized before the rise of social media, the web was an important point of reference; see the key statement by Peters ( 1997 ). On self-branding in the context of the transformation of capitalism, see Hearn ( 2008 ). On self-branding in social media, see Marwick ( 2010 ). On self-branding as a form of affective labor, see (Genz 2015 ). On the democratization and universalization of self-branding, see Khamis ( 2017 ).

In their influential Habits of the Heart ( 1985 , pp. 32–35), Robert Bellah and his colleagues distinguished two strands of individualism with long histories in American culture: “utilitarian individualism,” epitomized by Benjamin Franklin’s maxims about getting ahead through thrift, diligence, discipline, and calculation, and “expressive individualism,” epitomized by Walt Whitman’s expansive sense of self, identification with nature and the universe, and embrace of broad experience, deep feeling, unconstrained sensuality, and self-expression.

On the “authenticity work” of lifestyle bloggers and the chronic risk of being perceived as inauthentic, see McRae ( 2017 ). On the labor involved in “branding the authentic self” in the context of fashion blogging, see Duffy ( 2017 , chapter 4). The term “authenticity work” goes back to sociologist of culture Richard Peterson’s ( 1997 ) work on country music.

Even the discourse and practice of self-branding invoke expressive individualism: a successful brand cannot be arbitrary or manufactured ex nihilo; it must be seen as expressing one’s authentic and unique self. See McRae ( 2017 , especially pp. 21–22).

For the notion of “communicative abundance,” see Keane ( 1999 ).

As McRae ( 2017 ) notes, fans have substantial genre knowledge that enables them to identify standard moves that they then deem inauthentic.

On algorithmic personalization, see Weinberg ( 2018 ) and Lury and Day ( 2019 ). As Weinberg notes ( 2018 , p. 47), such personalization is itself homogenizing—a form of “mass production by other means.”

In one widely used instrument for assessing such problematic use, “mood regulation”—captured by agreement with such statements as “I have used the Internet to make myself feel better when I was down”—is one of four conceptual components of problematic Internet use (the others being “preference for online social interaction,” “deficient self-regulation,” and “negative outcomes”) (Caplan 2010 ).

For music, see J. C. Wang et al. ( 2015 ); for analogous work on video, see S. Wang and Q. Ji ( 2015 ); Tripathi et al. ( 2019 ). On the automated detection of boredom from patterns of smartphone usage, enabling “boredom-triggered proactive recommender systems,” see Pielot et al. ( 2015 ). On “affective computing,” “emotion analytics,” and “sentiment analysis” more generally, see Zuboff ( 2019 , pp. 282ff).

On the role of dopamine in the “hub of reward, anticipation, and motivation,” see Sapolsky ( 2017 , pp. 64–76 ; the quotation is from p. 76). On dopamine and social media, see Haynes ( 2018 ); Weinschenk ( 2012 ).

Foucault ( 1988 , p. 18) discussed technologies of the self and technologies of power in connection with two other types of “technologies,” conceptualizing each as a “matrix of practical reason”: technologies of production and technologies of sign systems. Digital hyperconnectivity involves all four: for a preliminary canvassing of their interrelations, see Bakardjieva and Gaden ( 2012 ).

While Turkle ( 1995 ) does not use the Foucauldian language of “technologies of self,” her pioneering study shows how people can use anonymous online role-playing games as a way of working on the self. On blogging as a technology of self, see Bakardjieva and Gaden ( 2012 ) and, on academic blogging during the writing of a dissertation, Mewburn and Thomson ( 2018 ). For Foucauldian perspectives on life-logging and self-tracking, see Buongiorno ( 2016 ); Schüll ( 2019 ). On digital content curation as a modern analog of the ancient Greek hupomnemata, characterized by Foucault as a “material record of things read, heard, or thought,” see Weisgerber and Butler ( 2016 ).

On the shaping and governing of choice on the web, see Graham ( 2016 ).

On the notion of “empty choice,” see Kingori ( 2015 ).

As Mittelstadt et al. ( 2016 , p. 9) note, personalization algorithms might be claimed to enhance decision-making autonomy, in a context of information overload, by filtering out irrelevant information. But since it is the algorithm that decides what information is irrelevant, such algorithmic filtering may in fact abridge decision-making autonomy and nudge individuals toward “institutionally preferred action.”

The tension comes into sharp relief when one considers similarities of structure, if not of scope, between Sunstein and Thaler-style nudging in liberal democratic settings and the much more comprehensive system of authoritarian digital nudging embodied in China’s emerging “social credit” system, which likewise seeks to “responsibilize” individuals so as to create more “social trust” and likewise governs individuals “at a distance,” through the choices they make . On the social credit system, see Larson ( 2018 ); Mitchell and Diamond ( 2018 ); Loubere and Brehm ( 2018 ).

On “predictive shopping” generally, see Sunstein ( 2015 , chapter 7). On the outsourcing of taste to algorithms through retail subscription boxes, see Hu ( 2019 ). On the crucial role of algorithms that learn from experience and improve over time, making better predictions about which items the consumer is likely to keep, see Sinha et al. ( 2016 ).

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Acknowledgments

For excellent research assistance, I thank Morgan Boutilier and Alexander Ferrer; for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper I thank Elizabeth Brubaker, Jessica Collett, Jaeeun Kim, Gail Kligman, Rebecca Lin, Juliane Vogel, and Kaiting Zhou. I am grateful to Julia Adams for the opportunity to present an earlier version of the paper to the Comparative Research Workshop of the Yale Sociology Department.

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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

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.

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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.

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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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13 Self-Presentation and Social Influence: Evidence for an Automatic Process

Purdue University, Department of Psychological Sciences

• Published: 10 September 2015
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Self-presentation is a social influence tactic in which people engage in communicative efforts to influence the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others as related to the self-presenter. Despite theoretical arguments that such efforts comprise an automatic component, the majority of research continues to characterize self-presentation as primarily involving controlled and strategic efforts. This focus is theoretically challenging and empirically problematic; it fosters an exclusionary perspective, leading to a scarcity of research concerning automatic self-presentations. With the current chapter, we examine whether self-presentation involves an automatic cognitive mechanism in which such efforts spontaneously emerge, nonconsciously triggered by cues in the social environment.

In his classic work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , Erving Goffman (1959) popularized the concept of self-presentation, describing social life as a series of behavioral performances that symbolically communicate information about the self to others. Since the publication of this seminal work, research on self-presentation has bourgeoned, emerging as a fundamental topic in social psychology, as well as numerous other disciplines ranging from communication to organizational behavior and management. The breadth of work ranges from examining “the targets of people’s self-presentation attempts to the levels of awareness at which self-presentation efforts may be enacted” ( DePaulo, 1992 , p. 204).

Although theorists frame self-presentation from slightly different theoretical perspectives, there is agreement that the overarching goal of self-presentation falls under the umbrella of social influence, in that people’s self-presentations are aimed at influencing how others perceive them and behave toward them. Leary and Kowalski (1990) succinctly capture this goal in their characterization of self-presentation as including “all behavioral attempts to create impressions in others’ minds” (p. 39). The reason why people self-present is built on their recognition that the impressions others hold of them have important influences on desired outcomes ranging across a variety of life domains. Conveying desired identity-images provides a framework for people’s social relationships, holds direct and indirect implications for the achievement of occupational and financial goals, and satisfies important intra- and interpersonal functions ( Leary, Allen, & Terry, 2011 ; Schlenker, 2003 ). In all, self-presentation is a social influence tactic in which people engage in efforts to influence the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others as applied and related to the self-presenter.

There is abundant research examining various aspects of self-presentation; however, the literature remains replete with a number of entrenched misconceptions. One particularly persistent belief that continues to plague self-presentation research involves the implicit or explicit assumption that most if not all self-presentation involves conscious and deliberate efforts. The definitional words that researchers use to characterize self-presentation typically emphasize and focus on words like controlling, deliberate , and strategic . Self-presentation efforts are also frequently described as people trying to or attempting to influence the impression others form of them. Even Goffman (1959) defined self-presentation as a process in which people strategically control the inferences that others draw about them. We argue that the obvious face value of these types of words are heavily skewed toward controlled and deliberate efforts, and as such have exerted both an unbalanced and inaccurate influence on the resulting direction that most empirical research lines follow.

Although there has been a good deal of theoretical discussion focused on automatic self-presentation, there is a scarcity of empirical work, and the degree to which this work supports the viability of an automatic self-presentational component has not been fully vetted or reviewed. In this chapter, we focus on evaluating the hypothesis that the self-presentation process involves an automatic cognitive mechanism in which people spontaneously engage in automatic self-presentational efforts. We examine whether automatic self-presentations emerge of their own accord nonconsciously triggered by context cues, in the absence of direct instructional prompts. We also seek to actively draw attention to the dearth of empirical work examining automatic self-presentation; by doing so we hope to encourage researchers to more fully explore this vitally important feature of interpersonal behavior. To foreshadow our overall conclusion, although some evidence supports the general tenets of automatic self-presentation, it remains unclear empirically whether such efforts are truly emerging via a nonconscious mechanism. The key elements concerning such a mechanism relate primarily to the awareness (i.e., behavior is activated outside of conscious awareness) and involuntary (i.e., behavior is initiated by certain cues or prompts in the situation) features of automaticity as described by Bargh (1996) .

Our summary to date clearly begs the question: Why is construing self-presentation as primarily involving controlled and strategic actions, while giving short shrift to nonconscious efforts, necessarily a problem? To reiterate, self-presentations are typically described as involving controlled and deliberate actions that are grounded in the implicit or explicit belief that self-presentation includes only conscious efforts that are meant to explicitly influence others’ impressions. We argue that characterizing self-presentation as solely deliberate has the negative consequence of fostering an exclusionary research perspective, which results in severely limiting research attention to a narrower bandwidth of social situations. Such a narrow conceptual approach characterizes self-presentation as primarily occurring only in limited situations in which people are deliberately trying to control the conveyance of self-information to others. Put differently, if people are not consciously trying to communicate a desired image, it is simply assumed they are not engaging in self-presentation at all (see Schlenker, 2003 ).

These fundamental constraints shape and impact the theoretical and conceptual foundations of most self-presentation research. The majority of paradigms explicitly and directly provide participants with self-presentational instructions, narrowly focusing empirical attention on controlled and deliberate self-presentational efforts. Participants are instructed to consciously think about the particular impression they are trying to convey, and of importance, the impression per se becomes the focal goal, rather than framing the presented identity as a means to achieve another type of valued goal ( Leary et al., 2011 ).

Emphasizing that self-presentations comprise only controlled and strategic efforts also further promotes one of the most widespread misconceptions about self-presentation, which holds that such efforts are inherently false, manipulative, and duplicitous. Although certainly self-presentations can involve deception, for the most part, people’s efforts reflect an accurate, if slightly embellished portrayal of themselves ( Back et al., 2010 ; Leary & Allen, 2011 ; Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012 ).

Our summary is not meant to suggest that examining controlled self-presentations has been an unproductive strategy; such approaches have generated useful and valuable findings concerning basic self-presentational processes. Nonetheless, we argue that adopting a limited conceptualization of self-presentation as primarily involving controlled efforts results in an artificially narrow empirical framework. This serves to restrict the field of inquiry to arguably only a small and specific slice of self-presentation behavior, while relatively ignoring the broader automatic component ( Leary et al., 2011 ; Schlenker, 2003 ). Focusing on the strategically controlled aspects of self-presentation has left a lingering theoretical residual, resulting in forceful, but misguided assumptions that continue to reinforce and propagate the common misperception that all, or at least most of self-presentation involves conscious and deliberate efforts.

However, like most other social behaviors, self-presentation has also been characterized in theoretical terms as comprising dual processes involving conscious and nonconscious behaviors (e.g., Leary & Kowalski, 1990 ; Paulhus, 1993 ; Schlenker, 2003 ). In that spirit, theorists argue that self-presentations more often occur in an automatic rather than controlled fashion, and that the intentions underlying the initiation of such efforts do not necessarily have to be conscious. For instance, Paulhus (1993) suggests an automatic path for self-presentation that focuses on people’s tendency to communicate overly positive self-descriptions; Hogan (1983) proposed that self-presentational efforts often involve automatic and modularized behavior, unfolding in a nonconscious fashion; Baumeister (1982) posited that the intention behind self-presentation need not be conscious; while Leary and Kowalski (1990) suggest that people nonconsciously monitor others’ impressions of them and engage in automatic self-presentation when impression-relevant cues are detected.

Schlenker (2003) also proposed that context cues guide self-presentations outside of conscious awareness and trigger interpersonal goals, behavior, and motivation, and once activated, these nonconscious efforts continue until the desired goal or outcome is achieved. Schlenker goes on to argue that many self-presentations are characteristic of goal-dependent forms of automatic behavior. Evidence concerning social behavior, in general, shows that “goal pursuit can arise from mental processes put into motion by features of the social environment outside of conscious awareness … with the assumption that goals are represented in mental structures that include the context, the goal, and the actions to aid goal pursuit, and thus goals can be triggered automatically by relevant environmental stimuli” ( Custers & Aarts, 2005 , p. 129). The goal activation sequence and the operations to obtain a particular goal can unfold in the absence of a person’s intention or awareness.

In much the same manner, self-presentations can be conceptualized as being nonconsciously activated by features of the social environment ( Schlenker, 2003 ). This suggests that self-presentations comprise cognitive structures that include the context, the goal, and the actions to achieve the goal, and like other social behaviors, these efforts can be automatically triggered by environmental stimuli. People strive to achieve a self-presentation goal, although they are often not aware that such efforts have been activated. As a result, they do not characterize their behavior as self-presentation, in that they do not view themselves as self-consciously and purposefully trying to achieve impression-oriented goals. A key element underscoring automatic self-presentations is the assertion that such efforts comprise “behaviors that consist of modulated, habit-formed patterns of action” or consist of “an individual’s most well-practiced set of self-attributes” ( Paulhus, 1993 , p. 576; Schlenker & Pontari, 2000 , p. 205). Characterizing automatic self-presentations as habitual patterns of behavior finds broad conceptual support from the more general theorizing on habitual responding. For example, theorists’ perspective concerning the relationship between context-cueing and self-presentational efforts dovetails nicely with the general framework of habit performance as outlined in Wood and Neal’s (2007) habit model. We will highlight conceptual areas of relevance where appropriate, focusing attention on propositions drawn from Wood and Neal’s model. In summary, theorists argue that self-presentations can unfold in an automatic or habitual manner via a context-cueing process; these efforts are guided outside of conscious awareness when interpersonal goals, behavior, and motivation are automatically triggered by context cues in the social environment. Once activated, people’s self-presentations persist until the desired goal is achieved.

Our goal, in the sections to follow, is to examine the degree to which relevant literature supports the proposition of an automatic self-presentational process (for more controlled aspects, see Schlenker, Britt, & Pennington, 1996 ; Schlenker, & Pontari, 2000 ). Before delving into the empirical evidence, we first briefly outline one theoretical perspective—the self-identification theory—that provides a succinct and integrative framework to conceptualize and illustrate the processes and mechanisms thought to be involved in automatic self-presentation (Schlenker, 1985 , 2003 ). Although there are other automatic self-presentation models (e.g., Paulhus, 1993 ), the self-identification theory is arguably the most comprehensive one; areas of overlap with other approaches will be noted where appropriate.

Self-Identification Theory

Self-identification theory characterizes self-presentation as a common and pervasive feature of social life in which self-identification is broadly described as the process with which people attempt to demonstrate that they are a particular type of person. More formally, self-presentation is defined as a “goal-directed activity in which people communicate identity-images for themselves with audiences by behaving in ways that convey certain roles and personal qualities. They do so in order to influence the impressions that others form of them” ( Schlenker, 2003 , p. 492). The communication of identity-images provides a framework for people’s relationships, holds direct and indirect implications for the outcomes and goals that people receive, and satisfies valued intra- and interpersonal functions. Self-identification theory posits that communicating specific identity-images, via self-presentation, is a key aspect of interpersonal interactions.

Identity-images are desirable in that they typically embody what people would like to be within the parameters of their abilities, appearance, and history. These images often involve beneficial self-identifications that are structured to serve a person’s interpersonal goals ( Schlenker, 2003 ). In the parlance of self-identification theory the combination of a desired identity-image and a corresponding behavioral script is defined as an agenda , which is activated by context cues in the social environment ( Schlenker, 2003 ).

Although people are frequently motivated to achieve multiple agendas, the limits of cognitive capacity minimize the number of agendas that can simultaneously occupy the foreground of attention ( Paulhus, 1993 ). Some agendas necessarily receive greater attention, effort, and monitoring than others, with those considered more relevant operating in the foreground and those of less concern unfolding in the background. Imagine a computer running numerous programs—some open, contents displayed and attentively monitored and examined, whereas others are minimized, operating behind the scenes, working on tasks but not distracting the operator unless a reason or purpose to check them arises (this metaphor is borrowed from Schlenker & Pontari, 2000 ). In a similar fashion, agendas focusing on self-presentation concerns, involving the goal of communicating a particular impression to an audience, can be more or less in the foreground of conscious awareness. This leads us directly to an overview of background-automatic and foreground-controlled modes of self-presentation as described in the self-identification theory.

Foreground Self-Presentation

Self-presentation agendas that operate in the foreground are characterized as involving consciously controlled attention, with people exerting significant cognitive resources to plan and implement their behaviors. Such efforts consume cognitive attention by requiring people to first access self-information, after doing so they must synthesize and integrate the information in a manner relevant to an interaction and prepare it for expression; people make judgments about what to say and about how to communicate it to others. In doing so, people stay more alert and aware, consciously scanning and monitoring the environment to assess their behaviors and audience reactions. They engage in these efforts, in part, to accomplish the goal of communicating desired identity-images. Foreground self-presentations represent those occasions that people are most likely to report being on stage and consciously concerned with the impression they project to others ( Schlenker, 2003 ).

The antecedent conditions that direct self-presentation agendas to operate in the foreground involve broad features of the situation, the audience, and people’s interaction goals. People more thoroughly process a social situation when they perceive that the situation is important, in that their performance bears on their desired identity; involves positive or negative outcomes; or is relevant to valued role expectations. The motivation to process a situation is also more likely to increase when people expect or encounter a potential impediment (e.g., critical audience) to achieving their desired self-presentation goals ( Schlenker et al., 1996 ). This outline of foreground self-presentations is consistent with Paulhus’s (1993) description of controlled self-presentations; he posits that such efforts require attentional resources to consider one’s desired self-presentation goal and the target audience, prior to the delivery of any particular self-description. In summary, self-presentation agendas become salient, moving from the background to the foreground when the context is perceived as important or when obstacles impede the successful communication of a desired identity-image ( Schlenker et al., 1994 ).

Background Self-Presentation

In contrast and key to the current chapter, self-presentation agendas that operate in the background are conceptualized as automatically guided by goal-directed behavior, operating with minimal conscious cognitive attention or effort. This representation is akin to Bargh’s (1996) proposition that “automatic processes can be intentional; well-learned social scripts and social action sequences can be guided by intended, goal-dependent automaticity,” which refers to an autonomous process that requires the intention that an action occur, but requires no conscious guidance once the action begins to operate (p. 174). Like Bargh, Schlenker (2003) argues that self-presentations with familiar others, or those involving well-learned behavioral patterns and scripts, are characteristic of an intended, goal-dependent form of automaticity. Here, self-presentations involve an automatic process in which cues in the social milieu direct self-presentations in the absence of conscious awareness and trigger interpersonal goals, behavior, and motivation. Once activated, these efforts are maintained until the desired goal or outcome is achieved ( Paulhus, Graf, & Van Selst, 1989 ; Schlenker, 2003 ).

Theorists propose that background self-presentation agendas are automatically activated based on overlearned responses to social contingencies. This description is similar to Paulhus’s (1993) idea that automatic self-presentation is a residual of overlearned situationally specific self-presentations. These overlearned responses include scripts that provide an efficient and nonconscious guidance system to construct a desired identity-image. Context-contingent cues (e.g., audience) converge in the background to trigger automatic self-presentation agendas. People are often not aware that these efforts have been activated and, as a result, do not characterize their communications or behavior as self-presentation, in that they do not view themselves as self-consciously and effortfully attempting to achieve impression-oriented goals ( Schlenker et al., 1996 ).

While background self-presentation agendas unfold, people nonconsciously monitor their behavior and the audience’s responses to ensure a proper construal of a desired impression. For these automatic efforts to be overridden by conscious, controlled processing, at least two requirements need to occur. First, people must be motivated to think or act differently than what occurs automatically, and second, they must have the cognitive resources to support the flexible, relatively unusual sequence of actions ( Schlenker, 2003 ). If a deviation from a social script or an impediment is detected, the agenda can pop into the foreground. As a result, attention is drawn to conscious awareness to correct the misimpression and to achieve one’s self-presentation goals, shifting self-presentation agendas from a background to a foreground mode of operation. This attention-drawing process is akin to Paulhus’s (1993) automatic self-presentation model, where affect regulates that attention is directed toward any glitch in an activity that is currently unfolding via an automatic process.

Characterizing automatic self-presentation as habit-like is also consistent with theoretical descriptions of habits in general, as outlined in Wood and Neal’s (2007) habit model. They argue that the “automaticity underlying habits builds on patterns of repeated covariation between the features of performance contexts and responses—that is, habits are defined as learned dispositions to repeat past responses” (Wood & Neal, p. 843). Once the habitual response is created, it can be triggered when an individual perceives relevant cues that are embedded in the performance context. Even though habits are not necessarily mediated by a goal, they can also advance the original goal that first impelled people to repetitively perform the context-response, which in effect resulted in the formation of the habit ( Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000 ; Verplanken & Aarts, 1999 ). Habits and goals interface, in that habit associations are initially formed under the guidance of goals: “goals direct control of responses prior to habit formation, and thus define the cuing contexts under which a response is repeated into a habit” (p. 851). Theorists posit that self-presentations can become so well practiced that they operate like mindless habits that are triggered nonconsciously by environmental cues and unfold in an automatic fashion, similar to the operational processes associated with habit responding as described by Wood and Neal.

Having outlined the theoretical foundation for automatic self-presentations, we now examine research germane to the key question underscoring the current chapter: Do automatic self-presentations emerge of their own accord nonconsciously triggered by context cues, in the absence of direct instructional prompts? Following a review of this evidence, we provide discussion and critical assessment.

Evidence for Automatic Self-Presentation

Although the self-presentation literature includes a voluminous number of studies, the vast majority does not include measurements or manipulations that can be interpreted as depicting automatic self-presentation. Rather, previous work primarily centered on identifying self-presentation strategies, discerning when self-presentation will or will not occur, and determining whether such efforts communicate self-beliefs accurately or in a self-serving manner, promote self-consistency or maximize self-esteem, or depict self-enhancement or self-protective purposes (see Schlenker et al., 1996 ). There are a number of studies, however, that either directly involve the manipulation of self-presentational automaticity or focus attention on self-presentation behaviors that can be viewed as unfolding via an automatic process. Review of these studies will be divided into sections; the first four relate to the availability of cognitive resources during self-presentation and its effect on recall, self-presentation effectiveness, reaction times , and self-description , followed by sections focused on the availability of self-regulatory resources during self-presentations and the implicit activation of self-presentational efforts.

The first four sections examine the cognitive effects of automatic self-presentation, beginning with the general concept that there is a limit to people’s cognitive resources, and effectively attending to simultaneous activities that require cognitive effort is difficult ( Bargh, 1996 ). These limitations in cognitive capacity enable researchers to use empirical methods to investigate the differences between automatic and controlled self-presentations. Introducing a second, cognitively effortful activity generates nominal interference with a concurrent task if a process is automatic; however, this second task significantly interrupts the ongoing efforts if the process is controlled.

The Availability of Cognitive Resources during Self-Presentation and Its Effect on Recall

Given the proposition that automaticity consumes minimal cognitive resources, it follows that people should be able to more efficiently process information when delivering automatic self-presentations. To override these automatic efforts, however, more controlled self-presentations require an increase in cognitive resources ( Schlenker, 2003 ). As a result, controlled rather than automatic self-presentations may disrupt the processing of information ( Schlenker, 1986 ). To demonstrate empirically the presence of automatic self-presentations, the studies in this first section focus on the differential effects of automatic and controlled self-presentations on subsequent recall.

It is important to preface the studies that address this issue by emphasizing that Western norms typically favor positive self-presentations (e.g., Schlenker, 1980 ; see also Baumeister & Jones, 1978 ; Jones & Wortman, 1973 ). People are far more practiced at conveying a self-promoting identity-image (i.e., automatic self-presentation) rather than a self-depreciating one (i.e., controlled self-presentation). Self-promotion efforts would be expected to leave more cognitive resources available to process information and ultimately should have less negative impact on recall. However, engaging in self-deprecation—a controlled self-presentation—should remove the automaticity of self-presentation, increasing the demand for cognitive resources. These expectations found support across a series of studies in which participants displayed significantly better recall of interaction details when their social interaction comprised automatic compared to controlled self-presentations ( Baumeister, Hutton, & Tice, 1989 ).

Evidence also indicates that a key determinant of people’s self-presentations is whether an interaction involves strangers or friends ( Tice, Butler, Muraven, & Stillwell, 1995 ). From this work we know that certain constraints and contingencies position the communication of a favorable image as the optimal way to self-present to strangers, whereas a more modest identity approach prevails among friends. If these self-presentation patterns are habitually used, they should be relatively automatic, requiring minimal cognitive resources for encoding, leading to more accurate recall. Violation of these patterns, however, should trigger controlled self-presentations, requiring more cognitive resources, consequently impairing accurate recall. Like Baumeister et al., (1989) , this work also shows that when participants engaged in automatic self-presentations— they interacted with a stranger in a self-promoting manner or with a friend in a modest manner —their recall of interaction details was significantly better compared to when they engaged in controlled self-presentations— they interacted with a stranger in a modest fashion or with a friend in a self-promoting manner . Follow-up studies replicated these results and additionally demonstrated that even when recalling a stranger’s behavior people made fewer recall errors when engaged in automatic self-presentations rather than controlled ones ( Tice et al., 1995 ).

The Availability of Cognitive Resources during Self-Presentation and Its Effect on Self-Presentational Effectiveness

The studies in the prior section demonstrate that the automatic-controlled self-presentation process involves the availability of cognitive resources and, in part, familiarity with the self-presentational context. Automatic self-presentations are characterized by familiar and habitual self-presentations, which require minimal cognitive resources. It follows that under low cognitive demand people should be able to engage effectively in the self-presentation of familiar identity-images but also unfamiliar ones as well. In contrast, controlled self-presentations are characterized by unfamiliar and atypical self-presentations, which require increased cognitive resources. It can then be reasoned that under high cognitive demand people’s capacity to engage effectively in the self-presentation of unfamiliar identity-images will be negatively impacted, whereas the effectiveness of self-presenting a familiar identity-image should not suffer. To demonstrate an automatic self-presentation process, the studies in the second section focus on the effect that automatic and controlled self-presentations have on people’s self-presentational effectiveness.

In this first set of studies, Pontari and Schlenker (2000) interviewed extraverted and introverted individuals under low- or high-cognitive load conditions. As part of the instructions, these individuals were told to convey either an extraverted or introverted identity-image to the interviewer. It was thought that participants who enacted congruent self-presentations, for example, an extravert acting as an extravert, were acting consistently with their self-schemata. They delivered familiar and relatively automatic self-presentations, requiring minimal cognitive resources. In contrast, those who enacted incongruent self-presentations, for example, an extravert acting as an introvert, were acting inconsistently with their self-schemata. They delivered unfamiliar and relatively controlled self-presentations, requiring an increase in cognitive resources.

The results from these studies indicated that for extraverts and introverts alike, the self-presentation of congruent and familiar identities was successfully achieved in both the high- and low-cognitive-load conditions. Extraverts were also successful at self-presenting incongruent identities when they had sufficient cognitive resources available, that is, in the low-cognitive-load condition. However, extraverts were unable to successfully self-present incongruent and unfamiliar identities when they lacked the requisite cognitive resources, that is, in the high-cognitive-load condition. By comparison, an unexpected finding showed that introverts were successful at self-presenting incongruent and unfamiliar identities even when they lacked available cognitive resources. Pontari and Schlenker (2000) posited that the increased cognitive load interrupted introverts’ dysfunctional thoughts, which would have otherwise interfered with their capacity to engage effectively in controlled self-presentations. The additional mental tasks in the high-cognitive-load condition may have shifted introverts’ attention from negative self-ruminations to more dispassionate thoughts. This shift in attention may have allowed introverts to successfully enact a social performance that was relatively incongruent with their automatic pattern of self-presentational responses.

The Availability of Cognitive Resources during Self-Presentation and Its Effect on Reaction Times

A set of studies consistent with Pontari and Schlenker’s (2000) notion of self-presentations as congruent or incongruent with self-schema were carried out by Holden and colleagues ( 1992 , 2001 ). These studies focused on reaction times rather than self-presentational effectiveness to demonstrate automatic and controlled self-presentation processes. Participants were instructed to respond quickly to self-descriptive personality items in a manner that would make them appear either very well adjusted or not well adjusted. When participants made responses that were incongruent with a self-schema—conveying a favorable impression via socially undesirable items or an unfavorable impression via socially desirable items—their reaction times were slower. When they made responses that were congruent with a self-schema—conveying a favorable impression via socially desirable items or an unfavorable impression via socially undesirable items—their reaction times were faster.

These findings show that responding in a manner incongruent with a self-schema requires the availability of cognitive resources, whereas responding in a congruent manner consumes minimal cognitive resources and attention. The data also support the presence of a cognitive mechanism that is fast and efficient, and a cognitive override mechanism that is slower and intentional, which they suggest are consistent with the processes described in Paulhus’s (1993) automatic and controlled self-presentation model ( Holden, Wood, & Tomashewski, 2001 ). In Paulhus’s work, “automatic processes are those that are so well rehearsed that they are fast, oriented toward positive self-presentations, and operate without attention, whereas controlled processes are much slower and require increased attention” ( Holden et al., 2001 , p. 167).

The Availability of Cognitive Resources during Self-Presentations and Its Effect on Self-Descriptions

Other programs of research (e.g., Paulhus & Levitt, 1987 ) also posit that controlled self-presentations occur when attentional capacity is available, whereas automatic self-presentations emerge when attentional capacity is relatively limited. Controlled self-presentations are thought to involve conscious self-descriptions that are adjusted to fit situational demands with such efforts requiring available cognitive resources and attentional capacity. Automatic self-presentations, in contrast, are posited to involve nonconscious default responses that are characterized by the communication of overly positive self-descriptions. These efforts require minimal cognitive attention and resources, primarily because they consist of well-practiced and chronically activated self-descriptions ( Paulhus, 1993 ).

To examine these ideas, a series of studies were conducted in which participants provided self-descriptive ratings on positive, negative, or neutral traits while in a high- or low-cognitive-load condition ( Paulhus, 1993 ; Paulhus et al., 1989 ; Paulhus & Levitt, 1987 ). Results showed that participants in the high-cognitive-load condition endorsed more positive than negative traits. They were also significantly faster at both endorsing positive and denying negative traits when their resources and attention were focused on other tasks. Put differently, when cognitive attention was diverted, only a default set of positive self-descriptions was left available for automatic self-presentations. Paulhus (1993) concluded that increasing cognitive demands can trigger automatic self-presentations in which people are more likely and quicker to claim positive traits and deny negative ones.

In a similar fashion, cognitive capacity is also required for honest trait responding—it takes attentional resources to scan one’s memory for accurate responses. If cognitive demands are increased, attention is diverted and honest trait responding can be disrupted. But the subsequent responses are not random; they are systematically more positive and emerge from the positive automatic self. Evidence from a number of studies shows that participants instructed to engage in controlled self-presentations produced more positive self-descriptions in a high- compared to low-cognitive-load condition (e.g., Paulhus & Murphy, unpublished data ). These findings support the assertion that automatic self-presentations are activated when controlled self-presentations are disrupted by an increase in cognitive demands.

To examine this idea further, a second study experimentally created automatic self-presentation patterns and then tested whether these patterns reappeared under cognitive load ( Paulhus, Bruce, & Stoffer, 1990 ). To induce a new automatic-self, participants practiced communicating overly positive self-descriptions, negative self-descriptions, or honest self-descriptions by repeatedly responding to a set of 12 traits. Subsequently, participants were told to forget what they did during this practice phase and to instead respond honestly to the 12 traits (i.e., controlled self-presentation). During a first test, participants were given as much time as they wanted to respond, a low-cognitive-load condition, whereas in a second test they were told to answer as fast as possible, a high-cognitive-load condition. Results showed that the automatization effects that were created in the initial practice phase emerged in the high-cognitive-load condition but not in the low-cognitive-load condition. When controlled self-presentations were disrupted, automatic self-presentations appeared, as evidenced by the automatic self emerging only during the high-cognitive-load condition.

Another line of evidence also shows that people positively bias their descriptions of self-associated stimuli, and they do so without conscious awareness ( Koole, Dijksterhuis, & van Knippenberg, 2001 ). Theorists posit that early self-descriptions shape later self-descriptions by structuring self-relevant cognitions and behavior into working models, which can be nonconsciously activated ( Mikulincer, 1995 ). These models are conceptualized as an integral part of automatic self-presentations, typifying people’s most well-practiced and chronically activated self-descriptions ( Paulhus, 1993 ). When encountering self-associated stimuli, people’s positively biased self-descriptions can be automatically triggered and, as such, can be characterized as automatic self-presentations. If people lack available cognitive capacity, their self-descriptions of self-associated stimuli may reflect implicit and automatic efforts, whereas, if sufficient cognitive resources are available, self-descriptions may reflect more explicit and controlled efforts ( Koole et al., 2001 ).

These ideas were tested in two studies by examining the relationship between implicit self-positivity and explicit self-descriptions. Implicit self-positivity was measured by the name-letter bias ( Kitayama & Karasawa, 1997 ) and explicit self-description by participants’ self-ratings on positive, negative, or neutral trait words ( Paulhus & Levitt, 1987 ). With respect to the explicit measure, quickly delivered self-descriptions were characterized as automatic self-presentations, and slowly delivered self-descriptions were characterized as controlled self-presentations, primarily because automatic processing requires less time than controlled processing. It was expected and found that implicit self-positivity only matched the explicit self-descriptions when the trait self-ratings were quickly delivered but not when they were slowly delivered.

A second study mirrored the results of the first by manipulating the availability of cognitive resources rather than the delivery speed of explicit self-descriptions. Specifically, participants under a high cognitive load (vs. low cognitive load) displayed greater congruence between implicit and explicit self-descriptions. When cognitive resources were limited, it increased the self-positivity of explicit self-descriptions, in that the congruence between implicit and explicit self-descriptions only increased when controlled efforts were undermined, that is, in the high-cognitive-demand condition. But when participants were in a situation in which they possessed sufficient cognitive resources, their explicit and implicit self-descriptions did not match. When responding explicitly, participants presumably were aware of the self-presentation implications of responding in an overly positive manner and, as such, managed their responses accordingly. Their responses were far less positive when they were explicitly versus implicitly measured. In contrast, when participants lacked sufficient cognitive resources, they presumably were unable to consciously control the delivery of their explicit self-descriptions, which essentially then became automatic self-presentations. As result, their implicit and explicit self-descriptions were congruent in the high-cognitive-load condition; both showed positively biased self-descriptions, which is characteristic of automatic self-presentations.

Related studies also examined whether the automatic self-descriptions that underlie the self-positivity bias can be inhibited by consciously controlled efforts ( Koole et al., 2001 ). Here, participants were instructed to judge self-associated stimuli while focusing on either cognitive reasoning , which was thought to require more controlled efforts, or feeling , which was thought to require less controlled efforts. If greater preference for self-associated stimuli results from automatic self-presentation, a positive bias for such stimuli should increase when the focus is on feelings, an automatic response, compared to deliberate reasoning, a controlled response. In line with this reasoning, participants delivered more positively biased judgments for self-associated stimuli when they were focused on feelings rather than reasoning. This suggests that controlled efforts inhibit the emergence of automatic self-presentations. Participants also reported no awareness that they were displaying a positivity bias toward self-associated stimuli. In all, implicit self-positivity responses, based on overlearned self-descriptions, may be representative of automatic self-presentations.

The Availability of Self-Regulatory Resources during Self-Presentations

The first four sections focused on studies that essentially involved either low or high cognitive demands as a means to demonstrate, respectively, automatic or controlled self-presentations. We now turn to a set of studies that addressed the relationship between self-presentation and the consumption of self-regulatory resources ( Vohs, Baumeister, & Ciarocco, 2005 ). The logic underlying this relationship basically mimics the argument underscoring how the availability of cognitive resources impacts the degree to which self-presentations emerge via automatic or controlled efforts. When people engage in unfamiliar patterns of self-presentation, it requires increased self-regulatory efforts to override their habitual responses and to effortfully control their behavior. Carrying out “these effortful self-presentations drain[s]‌ more self-regulatory resources compared with presenting oneself in a standard, familiar, or habitual manner of self-presentation” ( Vohs et al., 2005 , p. 634). In four studies that examined this idea, participants were instructed to present themselves in a manner that was based either on familiar/habitual and less effortful patterns of self-presentations or on patterns that were unfamiliar/atypical, which called for more deliberate and thoughtful efforts.

The results across all four studies consistently demonstrated that engaging in habitual self-presentations demanded less regulatory efforts than carrying out an atypical or unfamiliar self-presentation, which required an increase in regulatory efforts, and subsequently depleted the self’s resources. As with cognitive demands, these findings suggest that automatic self-presentations emerge when the situation is perceived as more familiar and routine, and hence does not require exerting an increase in regulatory efforts. In contrast, more effortful and controlled self-presentations emerge when the situation calls for patterns of responding that are not typical or habitual, thus requiring more regulatory resources to be consumed. The results from these studies are consistent with the cognitive demand studies in the previous sections, again demonstrating that self-presentational efforts can assume different forms, and that conveying an image that is in conflict with one’s typical, habitual response patterns consumes greater regulatory resources than responses that follow one’s familiar self-presentational patterns. Automatic self-presentations require less regulatory resources than controlled self-presentations, which is theoretically consistent with the broad sentiment of the first four sections.

Cued Activation of Automatic Self-Presentation and Its Effect on Self-Description

For the most part, automatic self-presentations involve the conveyance of relatively favorable identity-images. Paulhus (1993) describes these efforts as “consisting of the individual’s most well-practiced, and hence, most chronically activated set of self-attributes,” which he posits are typically positive due to a lifetime of practice (p. 576). He argues that there are copious sources that underlie the widespread prevalence of the positivity that follows from a lifetime of practice. From childhood, people actively learn that they should provide more positively oriented self-descriptions and explanations for their social behavior. These ideas fit well with Schlenker’s (2003) description of background self-presentation agendas, which involve the construction of desired images of the self and are based on overlearned and habitual responses to social contingencies.

It is also important to note that although the majority of peoples’ automatic self-presentations are indeed characterized by positive self-representations, they are not necessarily restricted to just positive images. Certainly not all early life lessons and habits will reflect or result in only positive representations of the self. Some context cues can serve to trigger habit-molded patterns of behaviors that result in the conveyance of a less than favorable image of the self.

These automatic instances of less favorable images emerge from “people’s repertoire of relational schemas, or cognitive structures representing regularities in patterns of interpersonal relatedness involving a range of common interpersonal orientations: from expecting that another person will be consistently accepting, for example, to expecting that others will be evaluative or judgmental” ( Baldwin, 1992 , p. 209). Theorists propose that these relationships become internalized, in part, via the development of relation-oriented schemas. These schemas are thought to represent patterns of interpersonal behavior, consisting of interaction scripts including schemas for self and other as experienced within that interaction, which also include inference processes for communicating self-descriptions ( Baldwin, 1992 ). Researchers suggest, for example, that an individual can anticipate a negative evaluation because negative memories and knowledge structures have become activated, which influences how one anticipates and interprets a forthcoming or ongoing social interaction ( Baldwin & Main, 2001 ).

Theoretically any cue that has become linked with a particular interpersonal experience can trigger relational constructs and knowledge, and as such it can impact one’s current behavior ( Baldwin & Main, 2001 ). It is plausible that these cued activation procedures could impact automatic self-presentations, in that such efforts may involve more positive self-descriptions if the activated relational knowledge is associated with acceptance/favorability, and more negative self-descriptions if associated with rejection/unfavorability.

In a series of studies, researchers examined the idea that cued knowledge activation may differentially impact interpersonal behavior depending on the context of the activated relational schema. Although the direct intent of these studies was not focused on automatic self-presentations, the results, involving participants’ self-descriptions, can be construed as such ( Baldwin & Main, 2001 ). At the outset of these studies, participants underwent a conditioning procedure that surreptitiously paired expectations of acceptance and rejection with distinct aural tones ( Baldwin & Meunier, 1999 ). These conditioned tones were later used to nonconsciously activate the knowledge structures associated with acceptance and rejection. Specifically, during an interpersonal interaction one of the two tones from the conditioning procedure was repeatedly emitted from a computer terminal. The results indicated that participants communicated more positive self-descriptions in the acceptance compared to rejection condition and, conversely, more negative self-descriptions in the rejection versus acceptance condition. The conditioned tones to cue acceptance or rejection may have nonconsciously triggered automatic self-presentations, even to the degree that some of these efforts resulted in negative self-descriptions (see Swann, 1983 ).

In a similar fashion, other studies have examined the implicit motivational effects that significant others can have on automatic self-presentations (e.g., Shah, 2003 ). This research suggests that people’s self-representations incorporate the goals, values, and expectations that close others hold for them, and that the cued activation of these internal representations automatically influences people’s behavior via the other’s association to a variety of interpersonal goals ( Moretti & Higgins, 1999 ). The implicit effect of close others may extend to goal-directed behavior in which others influence people’s interpersonal behavior during ongoing social interactions. In other words, the implicit influence of significant others may serve to trigger automatic self-presentations.

To examine this idea, researchers covertly acquired the names of significant others, either an accepting or a critical other’s name ( Baldwin, 1994 ; Shah, 2003 ). These names were used at a later point to prime subliminally participants’ interpersonal goals. Following the priming manipulation, participants completed an ego-threatening task, after which they completed self-descriptive questionnaires. The results indicated that participant’s self-descriptions were influenced by the critical and accepting others’ name, even though detailed manipulation checks showed that participants were not consciously aware of name exposure. When a critical other’s name was primed, self-descriptions were more negative; when an accepting other’s name was primed, self-descriptions were more positive. These findings suggest that self-descriptions were nonconsciously influenced by the cued activation of relational schemas that were associated with the accepting or critical other. Subliminally reminding people, for example, of a negative, demanding or positive, friendly other may automatically trigger a be friendly or be aggressive goal, as well as the corresponding self-presentation behavior associated with the activated relational schema.

Consistent with the idea of cued activation, Tyler (2012) utilized priming procedures across a set of three studies to assess directly the automatic nature of self-presentational efforts. In the first two studies, participants were primed with words associated with impression-oriented people or with a set of neutral words; the second study also included a condition in which participants received explicit self-presentation instructions to present themselves favorably. In the first study, the self-presentation measure involved participants answering a series of self-descriptive questions put forth by the experimenter. With the second study, each participant engaged in an unscripted conversation with a confederate, which was videotaped and later coded for how favorable the participants described themselves. The results across both studies revealed that participants in the impression condition self-presented a more favorable image compared to participants in the neutral condition. The results from the second study also showed that participants’ self-presentations in the explicit condition mimicked the favorability of participants’ self-presentations in the impression prime condition. Put differently, participants’ automatic self-presentations were very similar to their efforts when they were explicitly instructed to self-present a favorable persona. The third study was grounded on the idea that the participating audience one is interacting with might serve as a nonconscious self-presentation cue. Here, participants were primed with words associated with friends or strangers. Following the priming procedure, participants were instructed to write a self-description, which was later coded with regard to how favorable participants described themselves. Analysis in the friend prime condition showed that participants self-presented a more modest image, whereas in the stranger prime condition participants self-presented a more self-enhancing image. Taken together, the findings across these studies provide compelling support for the proposition that people’s self-presentations can be primed by environmental cues outside of their conscious awareness.

Critical Assessment and Discussion

The driving logic underlying the proposal of an automatic self-presentational process is the same across all review sections, allowing for a straightforward interpretation of the findings. Recall that the goal of the current chapter is focused on determining if automatic self-presentations emerge of their own accord, triggered outside of conscious awareness by context cues in the absence of direct self-presentational instructions.

Automatic Self-Presentations and Context Cues

According to a number of influential models (e.g., Leary & Kowalski, 1990 ; Paulhus, 1993 ; Schlenker, 1985 , 2003 ), automatic self-presentations are predicated on habitual and routine response patterns that include scripts, overlearned responses, and well-practiced sets of self-attributes. For instance, Paulhus (1993) suggests “the default self-presentation, the automatic self, has it origins in a lifetime of self-presentation practice” (p. 580). Even more directly, Schlenker ( 1985 , 2003 ) posits:

Automatic self-presentations reflect modulated units of action that eventually “settle in” to become habits. These habitual patterns of behavior form self-presentation scripts that are triggered automatically by context cues and guide action unthinkingly, in relevant situations. Such scripts provide a rich store of knowledge and experience (i.e., relational knowledge), which can be automatically accessed to quickly and effectively communicate desired identity-images. When a script is triggered consciously or unconsciously by context cues, it provides a definition of the situation being encountered, a set of expectations about events, and a set of operations for thoughts and behaviors in the situation. (pp. 76, 495)

A common thread among these models underscores the notion that habitual self-presentation patterns are triggered by context cues and people are not consciously aware that their efforts are influenced by such cues. Although the exact nature of context cues varies from occasion to occasion, in general, “the situation or audience itself cues associated information about the self, social roles, and social expectations in memory and makes salient the context-contingencies between particular self-presentations and relevant outcomes” ( Schlenker, 1986 , p. 35). This description accentuates the context-contingent nature of the cues that can trigger automatic self-presentations and, as noted earlier, has a straightforward connection with Wood and Neal’s (2007) habit model, in that habits are characterized as learned dispositions to repeat past responses and are activated by context cues. In summary, theorists’ characterization of automatic self-presentations as habit responses, automatically triggered by context cues, unfolds in much the same fashion as Wood and Neal describe habit performances.

Describing automatic self-presentations as triggered by context cues is also consistent with the characterization of automatic processes as involuntary, such that people’s behavior is activated by prompts in the social environment ( Bargh, 1996 ). Schlenker and Pontari (2000) also argue that background self-presentations are guided by an intended, goal-dependent automatic process, characterized as “an autonomous process requiring the intention that it occur, and thus awareness that it is occurring, but no conscious guidance once put into operation” ( Bargh, 1996 , p. 174). Self-presentational efforts that emerge via an intended, goal-dependent automatic process comprise a well-learned, sequential set of actions that were previously associated with goal accomplishment. People are not consciously aware that context cues influence their social behavior; however, the goal-directed activity of structuring and maintaining a desired identity is nonetheless occurring. In summary, theorists contend that automatic self-presentations are activated nonconsciously by cues in the social situation and are founded on overlearned responses to behavioral-outcome contingencies.

Consistent with self-presentation theories and with support from more general models of habit responding, we argue that cues in the social environment, in and of themselves, are a necessary imperative and represent the fundamental cornerstone with which to establish the validity of an automatic self-presentation process. Although such a process has strong logical and theoretical footing, without corroborating evidence for context cuing, the process would nonetheless remain nothing but a conceptual proposition. If we fail to demonstrate empirically a context-contingent pathway for the nonconscious activation of automatic self-presentations, there is no other logical or clear mechanism with which to build and support an evidentiary foundation for such a process. As a result, we would necessarily be required to accept the notion outlined at the outset of this chapter: that the vast majority of self-presentations involve controlled and deliberate efforts, and as such only emerge during very specific sets of narrowly defined occasions. Without clear and sustaining evidence demonstrating that cues in the social environment trigger automatic self-presentations, identifying a mechanistic pathway for an automatic self-presentational process would be untenable. This leads directly to the key question underpinning our goal for this chapter: Do automatic self-presentations emerge of their own accord, triggered outside of conscious awareness by context cues in the absence of explicit self-presentation instructions? This issue relates to specific features of automatic processes in which self-presentations are thought to be involuntary responses initiated outside of conscious awareness by prompts in the social environment.

To shed light on this question, we look to the studies outlined in the research section. Although the evidence in support is quite limited, the findings suggest that automatic self-presentations are likely to emerge during situations involving familiar and routine patterns of responding, which require minimal cognitive and regulatory resources. Presenting oneself in accord with habitual response patterns required less effort, was delivered with greater speed, and was more likely to involve a favorable presentation of self. For instance, the studies that focused on recall measures demonstrate that automatic self-presentational efforts represent habitual patterns of responding that can be triggered automatically by features of the audience and situation ( Schlenker, 2003 ). To go against habitual patterns requires foregoing the benefits of automaticity, with the resulting use of controlled self-presentations then operating like cognitive load. Faced with the need to make conscious self-presentation decisions, people are then left with diminished cognitive resources, for example, to encode and recall information. The studies addressing the effect of cognitive resources on self-presentational effectiveness also illustrate that habitual self-presentations transpire with minimal resource demands, and they can unfold effectively even if an individual is faced with other cognitively demanding activities. Engaging in controlled self-presentations, however, requires increased cognitive resources and, as such, suffers if an individual is simultaneously engaged in other efforts that diminish his or her resources. These findings are consistent with Schlenker and Pontari’s (2000) notion of foreground self-presentations, which require available cognitive resources, and background self-presentations, which require minimal resources, primarily because background efforts are founded on repeatedly used scripts and over time have emerged as habitual aspects of a person’s personality and identity. In all, participants prompted to self-present in a typical or familiar manner displayed cognitive effects consistent with an automatic process.

It is important, however, to emphasize that the design of most of the studies involved the efficiency feature of automatic processes, which focused on the influence that available cognitive resources have on self-presentations. Such evidence only demonstrates that automatic self-presentational behavior may occur in the absence of controlled efforts; that is, once consciously activated, self-presentations may unfold in an autonomous manner. For the most part, participants were aware of the goal conditions, in that they received explicit instructions to engage in a specific type of self-presentation, typically one that was either congruent or incongruent with what would be expected in that particular situation, and with the implication that under certain conditions these different self-presentations would consume more or less cognitive resources. These research designs did not just rely on the presence of context cues to nonconsciously trigger automatic self-presentations, and because participants were explicitly given instructions to self-present in a particular manner, it is impossible to tease apart any effects being due to self-presentation instructions or to context cues. We argue that the majority of research cannot unequivocally confirm an automatic process; the data do not allow for definitive conclusions in that we cannot determine whether self-presentations were triggered outside of conscious awareness by context cues in the absence of explicit self-presentation instructions.

However, the few studies outlined in the cued activation section may offer plausible evidence supporting the proposition that self-presentation involves an automatic cognitive mechanism in which people’s efforts are nonconsciously triggered by context cues. Together, these studies demonstrate that cued knowledge activation, the implicit influence of significant others, and the subliminal priming of self-presentation cues can influence people’s self-presentational efforts. For instance, as a context cue, the conditioned aural tones triggered self-presentations outside of conscious awareness, in that positive or negative self-descriptions emerged, respectively, when participants were surreptitiously cued with a tone that had been previously paired with either acceptance or rejection ( Baldwin & Meunier, 1999 ). Results from Shah (2003) also showed that participants’ self-descriptions were more negative when primed with a critical other’s name and more positive when primed with an accepting others’ name. He proffered that this effect occurred because the self-descriptions were nonconsciously influenced by the cued activation of relational schemas, which had become cognitively and emotionally linked over time to an accepting or critical other. In the same vein, Tyler’s (2012) data revealed that participants primed with an impression word self-presented a more favorable persona, which not incidentally mimicked self-presentations in an explicit self-presentation control condition. Tyler’s findings, which are consistent with Tice et al. (1995) , also showed that participants primed with friend-oriented words self-presented a more modest image, whereas those primed with stranger-oriented words conveyed a more self-enhancing image.

The findings outlined in the cued activation section are theoretically consistent with the concept of a background self-presentation agenda in which an individual’s behavior is automatically guided based on repeatedly used scripts that have been successful in the past. The behaviors that ensue comprise patterns of action that are habit-formed and emerge without conscious awareness. In a background mode, impression-relevant cues prompt or activate self-presentations, although people are not consciously aware that their efforts are, in part, fashioned by the social environment and their activated self-presentation scripts ( Schlenker & Pontari, 2000 ). These automatic self-presentations typically represent positive characterizations of the self, but as the studies in the final review section illustrate, they can also involve more negatively oriented self-descriptions.

Although we tender our comments with a healthy degree of caution, we are optimistic that the results utilizing very subtle or subliminally primed context cues offer the strongest, albeit limited evidence in support of the proposition that self-presentations can be activated by environmental cues outside of conscious awareness. What these few studies seriously lack, however, is an examination of the effect during an actual ongoing social interaction.

Future work is sorely needed to not only conceptually replicate the cued context and priming effects but also to move the examination of these effects into more real-life types of situations ( Leary et al., 2011 ). To do so will require the use of creative designs to offset the fact that in real-life settings the context cues may often exist within the boundaries of people’s conscious awareness. People are cognizant of an audience, for instance, and as such, their self-presentations may be guided by an intended, but goal-dependent, automatic process, which is consistent with background self-presentations as proposed in the self-identification theory.

We also emphasize that any research designs utilizing context cues or primes to trigger automatic self-presentations need to take particular care to ensure that the cues/primes are not transparent, and that their influence occurs, indeed via a nonconscious mechanism. Clarifying the mechanism underlying automatic self-presentation is of key import, in part, because research designs may unintentionally neglect cues in the experimental setting that nonconsciously trigger or motivate self-presentational behavior, which of course, would inadvertently affect the subsequent results. This concern has historical precedent; during the 1970s, a significant amount of self-presentation research was aimed at providing alternatives to the currently held explanations for a variety of interpersonal phenomena. Results from numerous studies, spanning wide domains within social psychology, provided evidence demonstrating that people’s interpersonal behavior (e.g., helping behavior, conformity, cognitive dissonance, voting behavior) was influenced by their desire that others view them in a particular fashion (e.g., Tedeschi, Schlenker, & Bonoma, 1971 ; see Leary, 1995 ). For the most part, the self-presentation perspective argued, “that the people we use as the sources of behavioral data are active, anticipatory, problem-solving, role-playing, and impression-managing beings ( Page, 1981 , p. 59; see Adair, 1973 ). Page further argued that experimental subjects “may feel very much as if they are on stage ( Goffman, 1959 , ), and they may control and calculate their own behavior so as not to receive what in their own eyes would be a negative evaluation of their performance” (p. 60). At the time, these contentions were directly aimed at participants’ consciously, controlled self-presentational efforts and were viewed by traditional social psychology as methodological artifacts that could be ameliorated (see Kruglanski, 1975 ). The degree to which these issues have actually been remedied is well beyond the scope of the current chapter. If theorists’ proposition is correct, however, and automatic self-presentations are a ubiquitous feature of people’s daily life, it would behoove researchers to assiduously examine their experimental design and protocols to determine if potential cues in the laboratory setting are unintentionally triggering participants’ automatic self-presentational efforts. If this were the case, the concerns are obvious and meaningful, in that such cued behavior would severely confound any subsequent results and data interpretation.

An essential ingredient of the research that directly examines automatic self-presentations is the development of tightly designed control or comparison conditions; at the least, such conditions must demonstrate that the absence of a particular cue leads to less self-presentational efforts compared to the presence of the cue. Such research designs must also keep potential self-presentational motivations, for example, goal importance and audience status, constant across all experimental conditions, while manipulating the context-cued condition. If the design fails to adequately do so, it is nearly impossible to determine if participants’ self-presentation efforts are unfolding in a background mode or whether other motivational factors have shifted participants’ efforts to the foreground. It is important to evaluate implicit self-presentation cues, not only for their effectiveness at triggering automatic self-presentations, but also to ensure that they are able to do so in a nonconscious manner.

Integrating elements from a number of the reviewed studies may also prove useful in examining automatic self-presentations, particularly during the course of an ongoing interpersonal interaction. In a number of studies, various self-presentations were characterized as comprising or inducing different levels of cognitive demand, which combined with information processing measures, enabled researchers to infer automatic self-presentations. Much of the evidence indicated that when cognitive attention was diverted only a default set of positive self-descriptions remained available for automatic self-presentations. By turning the notion around that different self-presentations induce high or low cognitive load, one could predict that high- or low-cognitive-load circumstances would lead to automatic or controlled self-presentations, respectively. It would be fruitful to manipulate the level of cognitive demand during an ongoing interpersonal interaction in the absence of any explicit self-presentation instructions, with the expectation that automatic self-presentations (i.e., default set of positive self-descriptions) should emerge in the high- compared to low-cognitive-load condition. Rather than assess self-ratings or recall, it would also be more externally valid and informative to measure and/or code people’s self-descriptions or behaviors.

Although Pontari and Schlenker’s extravert-introvert study (2000) involved explicit self-presentation instructions, it followed a design similar to the one proposed herein; they directly manipulated cognitive demands during an interaction. Automatic self-presentations were presumed to have occurred under conditions in which participants were instructed to engage in congruent self-presentations in both the high- and low-cognitive-load conditions. One can readily imagine adding another condition in which participants under both cognitive load conditions received no explicit self-presentation instructions. The results from such a condition should mirror the data from the presumed automatic self-presentation condition because participants in either cognitive load condition who received no self-presentation instructions would have no particular reason or motivation to behave in a manner other than the one they are most familiar with—extraverts would act extraverted and introverts would act introverted. If this no-instruction condition replicated the automatic self-presentation condition, it would provide additional support for an automatic component to the self-presentation process. It would also provide much needed evidence to demonstrate that automatic self-presentations emerge spontaneously during interpersonal interactions, in the absence of any direct instructional prompts.

At the start of this chapter, we argued that characterizing self-presentation in terms that predominantly evoke controlled and strategic efforts is not only theoretically challenging but also empirically problematic. It serves to foster an exclusionary research perspective, severely limiting research attention, leading to a paucity of work examining automatic self-presentations. Following a conceptual approach that positions self-presentation as occurring primarily in limited situations has fundamentally shaped the fabric of most self-presentation research designs, in that participants are often explicitly provided with self-presentation instructions, essentially bypassing the issue of context cuing.

Although the scarcity of empirical work became apparent in the evidence sections, the studies that are available offer some promising avenues for future work. Pontari and Schlenker’s (2000) extravert-introvert studies suggest an empirical direction and offer results to build and expand upon. The cued activation and priming studies not only provide the strongest evidence to date for automatic self-presentations, but they also provide a solid empirical foundation with which to design additional work. Nonetheless, the evidence remains very limited, underscoring a palpable and substantive need for further research. Considerable work remains to be done in order to determine empirically whether self-presentations are actually triggered nonconsciously by cues in the social environment, in that people are unaware of the initiation, flow, or impact of their self-presentational efforts.

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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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YouTube Removes ‘Joker 2’ Warning From Trailer

By Todd Spangler

Todd Spangler

NY Digital Editor

• YouTube Removes ‘Joker 2’ Warning From Trailer 15 hours ago
• Disney Releases Official Vote Tallies from 2024 Shareholders Meeting, Showing 9 of Its 12 Board Candidates Each Received More Than 90% Shares Cast in Their Favor 1 day ago
• ‘Star Wars Outlaws’ Launch Date Set, Trailer Released 2 days ago

UPDATED, 2:30 p.m. ET: YouTube on Wednesday removed a warning that the “ Joker 2 ” trailer may include “suicide or self-harm topics.” A rep for the video platform said its systems had “incorrectly” applied the warning label.

“We determined that our systems applied the warning interstitial incorrectly,” a YouTube spokesperson told Variety . “The trailer remains available on YouTube without a warning.”

YouTube is advising viewer discretion with the newly dropped trailer for Warner Bros.’ “ Joker: Folie à Deux ” — warning users that it “may contain suicide or self-harm topics.”

The scene that may have triggered the content warning: Harley Quinn (played by Lady Gaga) makes a finger-gun gesture then holds it to her temple before pulling the “trigger.”

“I’m nobody. I haven’t done anything with my life like you have,” Harley Quinn tells Joker as she mimes shooting herself in the head.

Under YouTube’s Community Guidelines policy covering suicide and self-harm content, the video platform says, it may add “a warning on your video before it starts playing, indicating that it contains content relating to suicide and self-harm” in addition to a panel under the video with “supportive resources such as phone numbers of suicide prevention organizations.”

The 2 minute and 24 second teaser trailer shows Joaquin Phoenix reprising his Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck (who later becomes the Joker) first meeting Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn when they’re both inmates at Gotham’s notorious Arkham Asylum. The pair fall madly in love before hatching a plan to break out of the joint.

Variety last month reported that “Joker 2” is a sort of jukebox musical,  with at least 15 reinterpretations of well-known songs. (The trailer features a version of “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”) At CinemaCon, Phillips said that categorization isn’t entirely accurate although the movie will feature plenty of song and dance numbers. “I like to say it’s a movie where music is an essential element,” the director said. “It doesn’t veer too far from the first film. Arthur has music in him. He has a grace to him.”

If you or anyone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at  1-800-273-8255  or go to  SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources .

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ENGRC 3025 Creating and Communicating Your Digital Professionalism

Course description.

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024 . Courses of Study 2024-2025 is scheduled to publish mid-June.

Senior-level course focused on creating and communicating an online professional identity. The key learning outcome is to enable students to develop digital professionalism, defined as a multimodal communicative competence honed through the practice of creating, critiquing, and reflecting upon digital artifacts they use to build and present their professional and public identities. The course will focus students' attention on (i) Production: What are the implications of using a particular platform to create a professional self? (ii) Representation: What tools do they need to analyze their own multimodal presentation of their professional selves? (iii) Circulation: What are the effects of having online representations of themselves as professionals? and (iv) Audience: What are their expectations about who will be viewing/interpreting those professional selves and for what purpose?

When Offered Fall, Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: seniors. Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: completed internship, professional experience, or significant undergraduate research; familiarity with HTML, CSS, and/or website development.

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  Regular Academic Session.  

Credits and Grading Basis

1 Credit Graded (Letter grades only)

Class Number & Section Details

 7297 ENGRC 3025   LEC 001

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• M 1:25pm - 2:15pm To Be Assigned
• Aug 26 - Dec 9, 2024

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Mozafari, C

To be determined. There are currently no textbooks/materials listed, or no textbooks/materials required, for this section. Additional information may be found on the syllabus provided by your professor.

For the most current information about textbooks, including the timing and options for purchase, see the Cornell Store .

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Instruction Mode: In Person Satisfies the College of Engineering's engineering communication requirement.

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 9412 ENGRC 3025   LEC 002

• W 1:25pm - 2:15pm To Be Assigned

10823 ENGRC 3025   LEC 003

• T 10:10am - 11:00am To Be Assigned

Hutchison, A

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