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The self presentation theory and how to present your best self

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What does self presentation mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tangible or social benefits:

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

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

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

To facilitate social interaction:

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

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

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

Identity Construction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Perception and empathy

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

2. Motivation

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

3.  A matching skill set

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

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

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

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

1. Get feedback from people around you

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

2. Study people who have been successful in your role

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

3. Be yourself

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

4. Be aware that you may mess up

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

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

5. Work with a coach

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

6. The identity is in the details

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

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

Allaya Cooks-Campbell

BetterUp Associate Learning Experience Designer

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, 8 clever hooks for presentations (with tips), how self-knowledge builds success: self-awareness in the workplace, how to not be nervous for a presentation — 13 tips that work (really), developing psychological flexibility, 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, 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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Impression Management: Erving Goffman Theory

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

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

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

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

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

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

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

On This Page:

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

Impression Management in Sociology

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Interaction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impression Management Techniques

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

Self-Presentation Examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Components

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

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

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

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

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

Impression Motivation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impression Construction

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

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

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

Self-concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desired identity

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

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

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

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

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

Target value

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

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

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

Role constraints

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

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

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

Current or potential social image

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

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

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

Implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Information

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

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.

References:

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

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a book that was published in the U.S. in 1959, written by sociologist  Erving Goffman . In it, Goffman uses the imagery of theater in order to portray the nuances and significance of face-to-face social interaction. Goffman puts forth a theory of social interaction that he refers to as the dramaturgical model of social life.

According to Goffman, social interaction may be likened to a theater, and people in everyday life to actors on a stage, each playing a variety of roles. The audience consists of other individuals who observe the role-playing and react to the performances. In social interaction, like in theatrical performances, there is a 'front stage' region where the actors are on stage  before an audience, and their consciousness of that audience and the audience's expectations for the role they should play influence the actor's behavior. There is also a back region, or 'backstage,' where individuals can relax, be themselves, and the role or identity that they play when they are in front of others.

Central to the book and Goffman's theory is the idea that people, as they interact together in social settings, are constantly engaged in the process of "impression management," wherein each tries to present themselves and behave in a way that will prevent the embarrassment of themselves or others. This is primarily done by each person that is part of the interaction working to ensure that all parties have the same "definition of the situation," meaning that all understand what is meant to happen in that situation, what to expect from the others involved, and thus how they themselves should behave.

Though written over half a century ago,  The Presentation of Self in Everday Life  remains one of the most famous and widely taught sociology books, which was listed as the 10th most important sociology book of the twentieth century by the International Sociological Association in 1998.

Performance

Goffman uses the term ‘performance’ to refer to all the activity of an individual in front of a particular set of observers, or audience. Through this performance, the individual, or actor, gives meaning to themselves, to others, and to their situation. These performances deliver impressions to others, which communicates information that confirms the identity of the actor in that situation. The actor may or may not be aware of their performance or have an objective for their performance, however, the audience is constantly attributing meaning to it and to the actor.

The setting for the performance includes the scenery, props, and location in which the interaction takes place. Different settings will have different audiences and will thus require the actor to alter his performances for each setting.

Appearance functions to portray to the audience the performer’s social statuses. Appearance also tells us of the individual’s temporary social state or role, for example, whether he is engaging in work (by wearing a uniform), informal recreation, or a formal social activity. Here, dress and props serve to communicate things that have socially ascribed meaning, like gender , status, occupation, age, and personal commitments.

Manner refers to how the individual plays the role and functions to warn the audience of how the performer will act or seek to act in a role (for example, dominant, aggressive, receptive, etc.). Inconsistency and contradiction between appearance and manner may occur and will confuse and upset an audience. This can happen, for example, when one does not present himself or behave in accordance with his perceived social status or position.

The actor’s front, as labeled by Goffman, is the part of the individual’s performance which functions to define the situation for the audience. It is the image or impression he or she gives off to the audience. A social front can also be thought of like a script. Certain social scripts tend to become institutionalized in terms of the stereotyped expectations it contains. Certain situations or scenarios have social scripts that suggest how the actor should behave or interact in that situation. If the individual takes on a task or role that is new to him, he or she may find that there are already several well-established fronts among which he must choose. According to Goffman, when a task is given a new front or script, we rarely find that the script itself is completely new. Individuals commonly use pre-established scripts to follow for new situations, even if it is not completely appropriate or desired for that situation.

Front Stage, Back Stage, and Off Stage

In stage drama, as in everyday interactions, according to Goffman, there are three regions, each with different effects on an individual’s performance: front stage, backstage, and off-stage. The front stage is where the actor formally performs and adheres to conventions that have particular meaning for the audience. The actor knows he or she is being watched and acts accordingly.

When in the backstage region, the actor may behave differently than when in front of the audience on the front stage. This is where the individual truly gets to be herself and get rid of the roles that she plays when she is in front of other people.

Finally, the off-stage region is where individual actors meet the audience members independently of the team performance on the front stage. Specific performances may be given when the audience is segmented as such.

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2.3: Self-Presentation

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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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When you give a presentation, it is important to remember the whole package, and that means how you present yourself as well as how you present the material.

It is not good to spend hours and hours preparing a wonderful presentation and neglect the effect of your own appearance.

Whether you like it or not, people make judgements about you based on your appearance.

These judgements may be conscious or subconscious, but they all affect how, and whether, your audience is prepared to take on board your message as presenter.

Our pages on Personal Appearance and Personal Presentation explain the importance of presenting yourself effectively, more generally. This page focuses on the impact of self-presentation in presentations.

The Importance of Expectations

When you stand up to give a presentation, the audience already has certain expectations about how you will behave, and what you will say.

These expectations may be based on the event, the marketing, their knowledge of you, or their previous experience more generally.

Expectations may also be based on societal norms, such as business people are expected to wear suits.

You don’t have to match people’s expectations, of course, but you do need to be aware that, if you don’t, they are going to have to spend time processing that difference. This mismatch will take some of their concentration away from your message.

You also need to be aware that people can only take so much discomfort.

A mismatch between expectations and reality can even lead to a situation called cognitive dissonance , where individuals come into contact with something — whether idea, person, or belief — that causes them to question their own internal beliefs and values.

This can be very uncomfortable, and the normal reaction is to try to avoid it. In a presentation situation, that's going to mean either leaving or just not listening, neither of which is ideal.

This is particularly important if you want to say something that your audience will find difficult to hear.

If you want to say something outrageous, wear a suit.

The late Dr Joe Jaina, Organisational Psychologist at Cranfield School of Management.

Aspects of Personal Presentation

Your personal presentation includes:

• Accessories, which in this context means anything that you’re carrying or wearing, including your notes, although it also includes luggage, bags, phones, jewellery, watches, and scarves;
• Body language; and

Your clothes are probably the most obvious aspect of personal presentation.

In deciding what to wear, there are several things to consider:

What does the audience expect?

It’s not actually as simple as ‘wear a business suit’, because this may not always be appropriate.

It does depend what your audience is expecting. On some occasions, or in some industries, smart casual may be much more appropriate. If you’re not sure, ask the organisers about the dress code. You can also ask someone who has been to the event before, or have a look online.

If it’s a regular event, there will almost certainly be photographs of previous occasions and you can see what other people have worn.

Within the audience’s expectations, what will make you feel comfortable?

You will present best if you are fairly relaxed, so you need to find a balance between the audience’s expectations, and feeling comfortable.

For example, you may have a particular suit that you think makes you look good. For women, it’s also worth thinking about shoes: you’re going to have to stand for the duration of the session, so make sure that you can do that.

If you’re not used to heels, don’t wear them.

Your accessories should be consistent with your clothes.

That doesn’t mean that your bag needs to be the same colour as your jacket.  However, if you’re wearing a suit, your notes should be in a briefcase or smart bag, and you’re not carrying a backpack or plastic carrier bag. Again, it’s about not distracting your audience from your message.

Likewise, your notes should be part of your thinking. Producing a dog-eared sheaf of paper is not going to help you project a good image. Papers tend to flap about, whereas cue cards can be held on your hand, which is why it is worth considering using cue cards, or even memorising most of what you’re going to say and using your visual aids as cues.

See our page: Managing your Presentation Notes for more on this.

The Importance of Self-Presentation

In 2005, the Conservative Party in the UK faced a leadership election as leader Michael Howard announced that he would step down. The actual election was held between October and December that year. In October, at the Conservative Party Conference, each of the announced candidates was given an opportunity to make a 20-minute speech.

Before the speeches, David Davis was very much the front-runner in the competition. However, his conference speech was considered poor. He spoke from notes, and never really came alive. David Cameron, a more junior member of the party and considered by many an outside chance as leader, made a speech that set the hall alight. He spoke without notes, and with passion, presenting himself as the young, upcoming potential leader who could take the party in a new direction.

By the following morning, the bookies had David Cameron as the front-runner and he went on to win the leadership election.

Self-Presentation also Includes Body Language and Voice.

While there are many important elements of body language, perhaps the most important is to project self-confidence .

You need to demonstrate that you believe in what you’re saying. Otherwise, why would anyone else believe it?

For more about this, and other aspects of body language that may help your communication, see our pages on Managing a Presentation Event and Non-Verbal Communication .

Part of projecting self-belief is being able to control your voice, and speak slowly and clearly. You also need to vary your tone and pace to keep people interested.

For more about this, see our page on Effective Speaking .

In conclusion…

When you are making a presentation, you are presenting a package: you and your message. The more you are aware of the impact of every element, the more effective the package will be as a whole.

Further Reading from Skills You Need

The Skills You Need Guide to Getting a Job

Develop the skills you need to get that job.

This eBook is essential reading for potential job-seekers. Not only does it cover identifying your skills but also the mechanics of applying for a job, writing a CV or resume and attending interviews.

Continue to: Presenting to Large Groups Top Tips for Effective Presentations

See also: Coping with Presentation Nerves Giving a Speech Presenting Data Building a Personal Brand

Dressing for Success: The Psychology Behind Self Presentation

Dressing for success is more than just putting on a power suit. It’s about understanding the psychology behind self-presentation. 

When you dress for success, you are sending a message to the world about who you are and what you want to achieve. 

And in this blog post, we will discuss the different factors that go into dressing for success, and we’ll provide some tips on how you can start dressing like a winner. 

What is self-presentation and why is it important?

Self-presentation is the act of managing how other people perceive and evaluate you. It involves using various cues, such as your appearance, mannerisms, and speech patterns, to create a certain impression in the minds of others.

When it comes to dressing for success, self-presentation is absolutely critical. How you present yourself to the world sends a powerful message about who you are and what you value. From your choice of clothing to your hairstyle and makeup, everything you do to present yourself can impact how others view you.

So what are some key factors to consider when dressing for success? 

Factors that go into dressing for success

There are many different factors that go into dressing for success, including your clothing style, color choices, grooming habits, and body language. Let’s take a closer look at each of these factors:

• Clothing style. Your choice of clothing plays an important role in how others perceive you. For example, if you tend to wear trendy and fashionable clothing items, this may communicate that you are creative and stylish (have a look at some examples of fashionable outfits here ). On the other hand, if you prefer more classic and understated styles, this may suggest that you are more reserved and conservative.
• Colour choices. The colours you choose to wear can also have a big impact on how others perceive you. For example, wearing bright and bold colours may convey an outgoing and fun-loving personality, while wearing darker or muted colours may suggest that you are more serious and professional.
• Grooming habits. Your grooming habits are another important aspect of self-presentation. People will often make snap judgments about you based on the way that you look and smell, so it’s important to pay attention to things like your hair, skin, and body odour.
• Body language. Your body language is an equally important factor in self-presentation. How you hold yourself, the way you walk and stand, and your facial expressions all convey a great deal about your personality and character.

How to dress for success in any situation

So if you want to dress for success in any situation, there are some key tips that you should keep in mind. 

First and foremost, it is important to pay attention to the expectations and norms of the situation. For example, if you are going for a job interview or meeting with a potential client, it is important to dress in a professional and polished manner.

But at the same time, you also want to make sure that you feel comfortable and confident in what you are wearing. This means choosing clothing that fits well, makes you feel good, and reflects your individual style.

Another important factor to consider when dressing for success is your body type. Different clothing styles and cuts will look better on different body types, so it is important to be mindful of this when choosing what to wear. 

For example, if you are petite, you may want to stick with more streamlined and tailored clothing items, while curvier body types can get away with wearing looser, more flowy styles.

Overall, the key to dressing for success is to feel good about yourself and exude confidence in everything you do.

Tips for putting your best foot forward

Now that you know the key factors to consider when dressing for success, here are some tips and tricks for putting your best foot forward in any situation:

First, pay attention to the colours and patterns you choose. Bright, bold colours can be eye-catching and help you stand out in a positive way, while neutral colours are more understated and professional.

Second, think about the cuts and fits of your clothing. Loose or baggy clothing can make you look sloppy and unprofessional, while form-fitting clothes show off your best features and help you feel more confident. 

But when it comes to form-fitting clothes, it’s important to find the right balance between being too revealing and looking frumpy. 

Third, consider the details of your outfit. Accessories like jewellery, belts, and scarves can add a finishing touch to any look, while well-chosen shoes and bags can help you complete your overall look.

The power of first impressions

One final thing to keep in mind when dressing for success is the power of first impressions. 

How you present yourself to others from the very first moment can have a big impact on how they perceive you, so it is important to always put your best foot forward. 

Whether you are going for a job interview, networking with potential clients, or just meeting someone new at a social event, it is vital to make a good impression and leave a positive and lasting impression on others.

So what are some things you can do to leave a good first impression? Some key tips include dressing appropriately for the situation, making eye contact and smiling when you meet someone new ( facial expressions are key to first impressions ), and being polite and respectful at all times. 

At the same time, remember to be yourself and own your style; by being confident, authentic, and true to yourself, you can always make a positive impression on others.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, dressing for success is about much more than just what you wear or how you look. Rather, it is about understanding the psychology behind self-presentation and using that knowledge to put your best foot forward in any situation. 

Whether you are going for a job interview, attending a high-profile party, or meeting someone new in a professional capacity, the key is to feel confident, be authentic, and exude positive energy.

Dennis Relojo-Howell   is the managing director of  Psychreg.

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The phenomenology of self-presentation: describing the structures of intercorporeality with Erving Goffman

• Published: 23 November 2015
• Volume 16 , pages 237–254, ( 2017 )

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Self-presentation is a term that indicates conscious and unconscious strategies for controlling or managing how one is perceived by others in terms of both appearance and comportment. In this article, I will discuss the phenomenology of self-presentation with respect to the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty regarding the visibility of the body within intercorporeal relations through ‘behaviour’ and ‘expression.’ In doing so, I will turn to the work of the Canadian sociologist and social theorist Erving Goffman. Goffman’s account of self-presentation suggests why embodied subjects adopt certain styles of ordered bodily behaviour as determined by the broader social order, giving existential and social significance to the ontological structures of intercorporeal bodily communication. Following Goffman, I will suggest that the embodied subject is continuously—and constitutionally—engaged in implicit and explicit strategies to manage how the body is presented to others. In articulating self-presentation as a feature of intercorporeality, my aim in this article is to use Goffman’s insights to extend Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of bodily communication by demonstrating that bodily communication that is instantiated at the level of intercorporeality is always expressed through social life with its various historical, cultural and linguistic dimensions.

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Gregory W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others: Specifying Goffman’s Phenomenological Omissions and Sociological Accomplishments,” Human Studies 28 ( 2005 ): 411.

Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012 ), 2.

The theme of intercorporeality as constitutive of subjectivity has been taken up by many contemporary phenomenologists. For instance, see: Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999 ).; Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012 ); Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002 ).

See: Mark R. Leary, Self-Presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behaviour (Madison: Brown & Benchmark, 1995 ), 2–3.

Jean-Paul Sartre articulates this concern we have regarding how the body and behaviour appear to others in his account of ‘the look.’ See: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology , trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003 ).

For example Jurgen Habermas accuses Husserl’s philosophy of being solipsistic in that it is only able to conceive of and theorise the singular subject. See: Jurgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992 ), 42.

Joona Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014 ), 74.

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1977 ), 91, §43.

See: Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 ), 124.

Husserl, Cartesian Meditations , 91, §43. Italics in original.

Ibid. Italics in original.

Ibid., 109. §50.

Ibid., 110. §50. Italics in original.

Ibid., 111. §50.

Ibid., 113. §51.

Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology , 126. See also: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in The Primacy of Perception , ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964a , b ), 120.

Husserl, Cartesian Meditations , 114. §52

Ibid., 118. §54

Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology , 124.

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London: Routledge, 2003 ), 235.

See: Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy - Second Book , trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989 ), 151–69.

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations , 240.

Ibid., 241. Italics in original.

See: A. Meltzoff and M. Moore, “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” Science 198 ( 1977 ).

The terms ‘intercorporeality’ and ‘intercorporeity’ are used variously to translate Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeité. See for instance: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible , ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968 ), 141.

Ibid., 184.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012 ), 363.

Ibid., 364.

See, for example: ibid., 338–41.

A.D. Smith, “The Flesh of Perception: Merleau-Ponty and Husserl,” in Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception , ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2007 ), 2–3.

Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 116–17. Emphasis added.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , 38.

A.D. Smith, “The Flesh of Perception,” 3.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , 368.

Ibid. Gallagher and Meltzoff challenge Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions regarding this early capacity for imitation, arguing that infant imitation would not be possible without a functioning body schema and a primitive body image that entails a rudimentary level of self-awareness. See: Shaun Gallagher and Andrew N. Meltzoff, “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies,” Philosophical Psychology 9, no. 2 ( 1996 ). Merleau-Ponty argues that infant mimicry is not true imitation but rather arises because of an unconscious and primordial participation in intercorporeality, or a ‘postural impregnation’ of my own body with the behaviour and expression that I witness in others bodies. See: Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 118. For further elaboration see: Jane Lymer, “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” Parrhesia 13 ( 2011 ).

Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology , 139.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , 341.

Ibid., 367.

Landes, The Weight of Others: Social Encounters and an Ethics of Reading (unpublished manuscript)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader , ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston Northwestern University Press, 1993 ), 103.

Ibid., 103–04.

Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162.

The Visible and the Invisible , 134–35.

Ibid., 154.

Ibid., 134.

This line of argument is developed more fully in Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of the relation with the other through ‘the look’ as constitutive of reflective self-consciousness. See: Sartre, Being and Nothingness . For commentary on ‘the look’ and its role in the constitution of subjectivity see: Luna Dolezal, “Reconsidering the Look in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,” Sartre Studies International 18, no. 1 ( 2012 ).

Quoted in: Landes, “The Weight of Others.”

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , 364.

Ibid., 382.

“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 104.

Donald A. Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 ), 3.

G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 402.

See: Talcott Parsons, “Interaction,” in Encycolpaedia of the Social Sciences , ed. D.L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968 ). Also see: Richard L. Lanigan, “Is Erving Goffman a Phenomenologist?,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 4 ( 1988 ).

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , lxxvii.

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1959 ), 15.

G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 404–05. See: Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 86–87., n. 6.

G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 405. See also: Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1993 ), 74.

Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967 ), 1, 2.

Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life .

Goffman, Interaction Ritual , 2.

Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance (New York: New York University Press, 2014 ), 25. See also: Stephen Pattison, Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013 ).

Goffman, Interaction Ritual , 5.

See: Luna Dolezal, The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015 ), 4.

Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: The Free Press, 1963 ), 35.

Philip Manning, Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992 ), 78.

See, for example: Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life , ed. Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007 ).

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , 244.

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984 ), 166.

See: Mauss, “Techniques of the Body.”

Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places , 35.

G.W.H. Smith, “Enacted Others,” 403.

Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 14.

Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places , 33.

Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 118.

Ibid., 119.

Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places , 35, 16.

See, for example, Chapter 5 in. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 ).

See, for example: Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162–63.

Landes, “The Weight of Others.”

Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 11.

Diprose, Corporeal Generosity , 54, 55.

There is research that demonstrates that seemingly ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ physiological movements and functions, such as heartbeat, breath and blinking, are part of the communicative social order. For example, on how breathing can be socially constituted, see: B. Lande, “Breathing Like a Soldier: Culture Incarnate,” Sociological Review 55 ( 2007 ).

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Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for funding my postdoctoral research. I’d also like to acknowledge the support of the Royal Irish Academy Mobility Grant which funded my research visit to the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University where the original research for this paper was carried out. Further thanks to Matthew Ratcliffe who read an early draft and gave me invaluable feedback.

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Dolezal, L. The phenomenology of self-presentation: describing the structures of intercorporeality with Erving Goffman. Phenom Cogn Sci 16 , 237–254 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9447-6

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Self-Presentation in the Digital World

Do traditional personality theories predict digital behaviour.

Posted August 31, 2021 | Reviewed by Chloe Williams

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

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

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

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

Seeking to Experience Different Types of Reward

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

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

Real-World Personality Theories May Not Apply Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 in Online Professional Networks: Men's Higher and Women's Lower Facial Prominence in Self-created Profile Images

Men are presented with higher facial prominence than women in the media, a phenomenon that is called face-ism . In naturalistic settings, face-ism effects could be driven by gender biases of photographers and/or by gender differences in self-presentation. The present research is the first to investigate whether women and men themselves create this different facial prominence. In a controlled laboratory study, 61 participants prepared a picture of themselves from a half-body photograph, allegedly to be uploaded to their profile for an online professional network. As expected, men cropped their photos with higher facial prominence than women did. However, women and men did not differ in the self-presentational motivations, goals, strategies, and personality variables under investigation, so that the observed face-ism effect could not be explained with these variables. Generally, the higher participants' physical appearance self-esteem, the higher was their self-created facial prominence.

Introduction

Gender differences exist in how the face is presented in relation to the body in pictures in the media: Men's heads and faces are presented in greater detail in media portrayals than they are for women; this phenomenon was termed “face-ism” (Archer et al., 1983 ). In research that focuses on the (sexual) objectification of women in the media (e.g., in advertisement) the phenomenon was termed “body-ism,” documenting the greater focus on women's bodies or body parts (Unger and Crawford, 1992 ). The present research investigates the relative face-to-body ratio in women's and men's pictures in online professional networks, a context in which photographs usually range from half-figure pictures to portraits. Most importantly, first impressions in person perception (Zebrowitz, 2006 ; Freeman and Ambady, 2011 ), such as those evoked by pictures in social media, influence crucial real-world outcomes such as choices of whom to date, befriend, or employ (White et al., 2017 ). Since higher facial prominence is associated with higher ascriptions of intelligence, competence, dominance, mental activity, and morality (Archer et al., 1983 ; Schwarz and Kurz, 1989 ; Zuckerman and Kieffer, 1994 ; Loughnan et al., 2010 ), it is important to pay special attention to the pictures that are used for self-presentation.

In their early media analyses, Archer et al. ( 1983 ) examined pictures of women and men in American newspapers, in works of art and photographs from several countries as well as in amateur drawings. Their investigation confirmed that men were more likely to be shown with a focus on the face, women with an emphasis on the body. This gender difference was consistently found in the mass media, namely in newspapers, magazines, television, and the Internet (e.g., Sparks and Fehlner, 1986 ; Nigro et al., 1988 ; Copeland, 1989 ; Dodd et al., 1989 ; Iijima Hall and Crum, 1994 ; Konrath and Schwarz, 2007 ; the effect may be restricted to certain magazines: Cheek, 2016 ). With regard to social media, past research documented face-ism effects on social networking platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, VKontakte, etc. (Reichart Smith and Cooley, 2012 ; Cooley and Reichart Smith, 2013 ) and on official websites of politicians and professors (Konrath and Schwarz, 2007 ; Szillis and Stahlberg, 2007 ; Konrath et al., 2012 ).

Archer et al. ( 1983 ) assumed that this gender asymmetry in facial prominence “may lie deep in historic conceptions about essential differences between the sexes” (p. 734), in that men are associated with mental qualities and women with somatic qualities such as physical attractiveness. Other researchers proposed that social roles of the depicted person function as a moderator of facial prominence (e.g., Sparks and Fehlner, 1986 ; Dodd et al., 1989 ), supported by the idea that face-ism may vary with (occupational) status (e.g., Matthews, 2007 ). Age, which is also often linked with status, was found to influence facial prominence as well. For example, faculty members displayed their faces more prominently than students (Read et al., 2017 ), and older women displayed their faces more prominently than younger women (Szillis and Stahlberg, 2007 ; Read et al., 2017 ). However, the underlying psychological mechanisms of face-ism in self-presentation are not yet fully understood.

In the existing naturalistic studies in social media contexts, face-ism effects might have been driven by gender biases of photographers and/or created by the depicted individuals themselves. People generally attempt to influence the impression they make on others and to ensure that their public image suits the demands of a particular situation (i.e., impression management; Leary and Kowalski, 1990 ; Leary, 1995 ). Having full control over their self-presentation in social media, people may highlight desirable aspects of themselves and conceal unwanted ones (Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2010 ). This may also include determining facial prominence in media profiles by choosing and editing their images.

The first aim of the present research was therefore to determine—under improved experimentally controlled conditions (and hence accepting a decreased ecological validity)—whether men and women themselves create face-ism in their self-presentation for an online professional network. We expected men to create higher and women lesser facial prominence in their profile pictures for the network (Hypothesis 1).

The second aim of the research was to examine whether differences in women's and men's impression management help to explain face-ism (body-ism) effects. The impression management of women and men may be influenced by their gender identities: women view themselves as more communal, whereas men view themselves as more agentic (see meta-analysis by Donnelly and Twenge, 2017 ). Communion refers to the maintenance of social relationships (e.g., benevolence, trustworthiness), while agency refers to goal-achievement (e.g., competence, assertiveness; Abele and Wojciszke, 2014 ). Past research has shown that various gender differences in self-presentation are in line with gender identities, more recently also with respect to social networking sites:

Men tend to engage in self-enhancement/self-promotion more often than women by emphasizing their best characteristics (Guadagno and Cialdini, 2007 ), they are also more likely to use assertive self-presentational strategies than women (Lee et al., 1999 ). Moreover, the fact that men are more narcissistic than women indicates their higher need for admiration and power (Grijalva et al., 2015 ). In a nationally representative sample of U.S. men, narcissists reported editing photos of themselves more frequently (i.e., cropping or cutting parts of themselves out of pictures, using photographic filters, and using picture editing software and applications) for photos they posted to social networking sites (i.e., on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest; Fox and Rooney, 2015 ). Furthermore, men are less concerned about their physical appearance (e.g., Dion et al., 1990 ; Gillespie and Eisler, 1992 ) and report higher appearance self-esteem (e.g., Gentile et al., 2009 ) than women. Men's higher acceptance of and confidence in their physical appearance may enable them to present their faces prominently, even given blemishes or defective features, whereas women's lower acceptance of and confidence may result in deflecting perceivers' attention away from potential facial imperfectness, which reduces facial prominence.

These gender differences in motivations, self-presentational strategies, and/or related personality attributes may help to understand why men present themselves with more detailed views of their faces than women. In doing so, both genders can ensure that their public image suits their gender identities and confirm gender-stereotypic expectations (Prentice and Carranza, 2002 ). Hence, we expected gender differences in facial prominence to be due to men's higher motivation and use of distinct strategies to be perceived as competent, assertive, and intelligent, their higher need for admiration and power (narcissism) and their higher appearance self-esteem (Hypothesis 2). Furthermore, we explored what participants intended to achieve with their photograph in the professional network (free response question regarding their goals).

To sum up, gender differences in face-to-body ratios in media representations appear to be a pervasive phenomenon. This may have important implications for the individuals concerned, as higher facial prominence is associated with higher ascriptions of intelligence, competence, dominance, mental activity and morality. To date, it remains an open question whether decisions and actions of the depicted individuals themselves contribute to face-ism in social media contexts, and if so, which psychological mechanisms underlie the phenomenon in the context of self-presentation in online professional networks.

Participants

The sample consisted of 61 university students (32 women and 29 men) studying various subjects. Most participants (98%) attended the University of Bern, Switzerland. They were recruited in cafeterias and libraries. Their mean age was 24.08 years (ranging from 19 to 33 years).

To determine the sample size, we used G * Power 3, a statistical power analysis program (Faul et al., 2007 ). The power analysis (high effect size of d = 0.75; α-level 0.05; power of 0.8; 2 groups) indicated a sample size of 58 participants.

The participants received all instructions and materials on a computer in the laboratory. In the introduction of the study, we asked participants to take part in a study on “how to present oneself in the best possible way with a picture on a professional network” (cover story). We then provided them with a screenshot of the starting page of a fictitious professional network. The webpage was developed for this study and looked like a typical registration website of existing professional networks, including input boxes to provide personal data (e.g., name, email address, password). Next, we provided them with a screenshot of an empty member profile of the network, including input boxes to provide more personal information (e.g., education, training). This profile also contained a space for inserting the picture. Afterwards, we took two half-body photographs of the participants and asked them to choose the photograph they believed represented them best. We then presented the photograph they had chosen on the screen. The instruction reads as follows: “We now ask you to crop the photograph that you selected for your profile. Please use the program which has been opened to prepare the picture that represents you best and then save the picture.”

Two independent researchers measured the prominence of the face in all pictures on printouts, independently of each other. The size of all pictures was 3,872 × 2,592 pixels with a resolution of 300 pixels. Both researchers used the same ruler and calculated face-ism indices for all pictures (Archer et al., 1983 ). The index was based on the ratio of two linear measurements (see Figure ​ Figure1): 1 ): (1) “the numerator,” i.e., the distance from the top of the head to the end of the chin, and (2) “the denominator,” i.e., the distance from the top of the head to the lowest visible part of the subject's body. The resulting values vary from 0 (only the body is depicted) to 1 (only the face/head is visible in the picture). Consequently, the higher the index, the more space is devoted to the face. A comparison of the measurements of both researchers revealed almost identical results for all pictures. The overall interrater reliability Fleiss Kappa was κ = 0.98.

Illustrates two different face-ism indices. Illustration of face-ism indices (using an iStock photograph). Solid line is the numerator, dotted line the denominator. Face-ism = Numerator/Denominator.

After they had cropped their pictures, we asked the participants about their goals. They described in their own words what they intended to achieve in the professional network with the help of their photograph (free response question). Two independent raters classified the answers. Independent of each other, the two raters set up the following nine categories, namely (1) make a competent impression (e.g., “exude competence,” “make a professional appearance”), (2) give a first impression (e.g., “give a first impression,” “show others what I look like”), (3) make a likable impression (e.g., “appear likable,” “leave a friendly impression”), (4) attract attention (e.g., “gain attention,” “arouse interest”), (5) be identifiable (e.g., “show what I look like,” “recognition”), (6) make an attractive/well-groomed impression (e.g., “appear attractive,” “well-groomed appearance”), (7) make an authentic/natural impression (e.g., “appear authentic”, “leave a natural impression”), (8) meet context demands (e.g., “presenting myself is part of my CV,” “provide an impression that suits the network”), and (9) make a trustworthy impression (e.g., “trustworthy appearance,” “inspire trust”). The raters assigned each goal to one of these categories. The overall interrater reliability Fleiss Kappa was κ = 0.75. In the few cases where their decisions diverged, they discussed the goal and agreed on a joint categorization.

Participants also answered 18 questions (on 7-point scales) that measured their impression management motivation, assertive self-presentation strategies, narcissism, as well as appearance self-esteem, presented in random order:

Impression management motives were measured with six self-developed items: “How much do you wish to highlight your competence/assertiveness/intelligence, attractiveness/the attractiveness of your face/the attractiveness of your body in this photograph?” ( not at all, very much ).

Assertive self-presentation strategies were measured with six items (taken from the self-presentation tactic scale ; Lee et al., 1999 ): “When I succeed at a task, I emphasize to others how important the task was” ( Enhancement ), “I try to set an example for others to follow” ( Exemplification ), “I point out the positive things I do which other people fail to notice” ( Entitlement ), “I use my size and strength to influence people when I need to” ( Intimidation ), “I express opinions that other people will like” ( Ingratiation ), and “I exaggerate the negative qualities of people who compete with me” ( Blasting ) ( disagree, agree ).

Narcissism was measured with three items (taken from of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory , Raskin and Terry, 1988 ; German translation by Schütz et al., 2004 ): “I like to be the center of attention,” “I find it easy to manipulate people,” and “I like to have authority over other people” ( disagree, agree ; Cronbach's α = 0.71).

Appearance self-esteem was measured with three items (taken from Dion et al., 1990 ): “I am self-conscious about the way I look,” “I am unconcerned with how others feel about my appearance,” and “I worry about how others are evaluating how I look (reversed)” ( disagree, agree ; Cronbach's α = 0.57).

Finally, since men were found to evaluate their photographs as more attractive than women (Costa and Bitti, 2000 ), we asked participants to evaluate their satisfaction with the picture they had prepared from one of the two original half-body photographs: “Please answer some questions concerning the photograph that you edited. In your opinion, how well does that picture represent you?” ( not well, very well ), “How satisfied are you generally with your picture?” ( not satisfied, very satisfied ), “How satisfied are you with the clothes you are wearing in the picture?” ( not satisfied, very satisfied ), “How attractive do you consider yourself in the picture?” ( not attractive, very attractive ), “Do you consider the picture suitable for the network?” ( not suitable, very suitable ), and “How likely would you use this photograph for the network?” ( not likely, very likely ). The responses were combined into a satisfaction with picture scale (Cronbach's α = 0.79).

Participants were recruited on campus and were accompanied to the lab by one male experimenter. Each participant gave informed written consent prior to being tested. The ethical committee of the University of Bern approved the study as being risk-free for participants and as maintaining their anonymity. In the online questionnaire we asked participants for personal data (i.e., sex, age, nationality, field of study, and/or profession). Then, another male experimenter took their photographs while they were standing on a marked line in front of a white wall. They were instructed not to move, to look at the lens, to keep their facial expression neutral, and to place their hands at the side of their bodies. Afterwards, participants were seated in front of a computer again. They were instructed to prepare the picture and to indicate their satisfaction with the picture. Then they continued to answer the questionnaire regarding their motivations, strategies, and personality attributes. Finally, participants were thanked, received a beverage and a chocolate bar for their participation and were debriefed. None of the participants was able to guess the hypothesis of the study.

Throughout this study, p -values of 0.05 or less were considered significant. Means, standard deviations, and correlations of all variables are presented in Table ​ Table1 1 .

Means, standard deviations, and correlations of face-ism, satisfaction with picture, self-presentational motivations, assertive self-presentational strategies, appearance self-esteem and narcissism.

Face-ism indices vary from 0.25 to 1. Higher values represent higher scores on the variables.

First, to rule out that the experimenter created face-ism when taking the original half-body photographs, we calculated face-ism indices for the original photographs that the participants had chosen as the basis for their picture. The values for the original photographs varied from 0.23 to 0.33 (for women: M = 0.28, SD = 0.02; for men: M = 0.27, SD = 0.02; t (59) = 1.99, p = 0.051; d = 0.51) and indicated a tendency of higher facial prominence for female participants than for male participants, thus working in the opposite direction of the proposed face-ism effect.

Second, to rule out gender differences in participants' satisfaction with their self-created picture, we conducted an independent t -test. We found that women ( M = 3.08, SD = 1.03) and men ( M = 3.10, SD = 0.84) were similarly satisfied with their photographs, t (59) = −0.08, p = 0.936, d = 0.02.

In line with Hypothesis 1, male participants ( M = 0.58, SD = 0.14) created pictures with a higher facial prominence than women ( M = 0.51, SD = 0.12), t (59) = −2.08, p = 0.042, d = 0.54.

To test Hypothesis 2, we compared women's and men's impression management motivations, assertive self-presentational strategies, narcissism, and appearance self-esteem. In contrast to past research, women and men did not differ significantly in the variables under investigation (see Table ​ Table2). 2 ). Men tended to present themselves as more intimidating than women (i.e., using their size and strength to influence people). The exploration of participants' self-presentational goals (free response question) revealed that most of them used the picture to achieve a competent impression, provide a first impression of themselves, to appear likable and/or attract attention; women tended to aim for a likable impression more often than men (see Table ​ Table3). 3 ). In sum, in the present sample differences in women's and men's face-ism index cannot be explained by gender differences in the variables under investigation. Only appearance self-esteem correlated significantly with participants' face-ism index: The higher participants' physical appearance self-esteem, the higher was their self-created facial prominence (see Table ​ Table1). 1 ). When calculated separately for women and men, however, the correlations were no longer significant (women: r = 0.26; men: r = 0.27).

Comparing women and men: means, standard deviations, and t -tests for self-presentational motivations, assertive self-presentational strategies, appearance self-esteem and narcissism.

N = 61 with 32 women and 29 men. Standard deviations in parentheses .

Frequencies, percentages and chi square-tests for women's and men's goals they want to achieve in the professional network with their picture (answers to the free response question; presented in descending order).

N = 61 with 32 women and 29 men .

This research represents the first attempt to determine whether women and men themselves create face-ism in their profile pictures for a professional network in social media. The strengths of this research are that participants themselves created their images in a controlled laboratory setting, which allowed for determining causality, and that gender differences in self-presentational motivations, goals and strategies, appearance self-esteem, and narcissism were taken into consideration, in order to examine underlying psychological mechanisms of face-ism effects.

The results of the laboratory study document that men indeed create more and women less facial prominence in their profile pictures for a professional network (see Hypothesis 1). But in contrast to past research and our assumptions, we did not find any significant gender differences in participants' impression management motivations, assertive self-presentation strategies, narcissism, and appearance self-esteem (see Dion et al., 1990 ; Gillespie and Eisler, 1992 ; Lee et al., 1999 ; Gentile et al., 2009 ; Grijalva et al., 2015 ; see also Hypothesis 2). Furthermore, women and men reported the same goals in using the photograph—above all, make a competent impression, provide a first impression of themselves, appear likable and/or attract attention. Hence, all variables under investigation did not explain the observed face-ism effect. Only appearance self-esteem was related to facial prominence in both women and men, but was no longer significant when analyzed separately for each gender. In any case, people with higher appearance self-esteem seemed to have less reservations about presenting their faces prominently, and used this opportunity to highlight (supposedly) desirable aspects of themselves.

However, in the present sample women tended to create a likable impression with their photograph more often than men, and men tended to use their size and strength to influence people (Intimidation) more than women. This is in line with women's communal and men's agentic gender identities. These tendencies are in accord with recent research showing that women are more likely to signal emotions (e.g., eye contact, smile intensity) on social and professional networking sites, whereas men are more likely to signal status in their portraits; e.g., more objects and formal attire; on Facebook: Tifferet and Vilnai-Yavetz, 2014 ; on LinkedIn: Tifferet and Vilnai-Yavetz, 2018 ). As higher facial prominence is associated with higher ascriptions of intelligence, competence, and dominance (e.g., Archer et al., 1983 ; Schwarz and Kurz, 1989 ; Zuckerman and Kieffer, 1994 ; Loughnan et al., 2010 ), women may have preferred to show less of their faces in order to be perceived as more likable. While this behavior may help to maintain social relationships, it may also result in being perceived as less intelligent, competent, and dominant. Future research needs to determine whether these differences in self-presentational behavior really give men an advantage over women or not and if so, in which ways. In any case, men's higher facial prominence may reinforce gender-stereotypical conceptions of men as more competent, assertive, and intelligent than women (e.g., Prentice and Carranza, 2002 ). The prediction of face-ism by appearance self-esteem as well as the observed tendencies among women to appear likable and among men to intimidate may be used as starting points for future research.

This research has certain limitations which also need to be mentioned: In taking the pictures, the photographers produced a minor difference in the opposite direction of face-ism, maybe because they were aware of the hypothesis and tried to avoid face-ism. Therefore, female participants had a slightly higher facial prominence than male participants in the original photographs from which they created their profile pictures. Future research should eliminate this problem by checking the face-ism indices of the original photographs before asking participants to crop them.

Furthermore, the present study was conducted by male experimenters only. It is possible that, being in male company, male participants felt more confident and were more willing to show their faces in detail. Although all instructions were provided online and little interaction took place between participants and experimenters during recruitment and photographing, it is advisable to engage both female and male experimenters in future research.

In general, people evaluate more distant pictures (half-figure, whole-figure) of themselves as more attractive than portraits (Costa and Bitti, 2000 ), which may result in a preference to avoid close-ups of their faces. The scenario of the present study, however, might have skewed the results in favor of higher facial prominence than would have been the case in real-life settings. In the laboratory setting, participants were asked to crop their photograph to prepare a profile picture for a professional network and to present themselves in the best possible way. Although this setting was developed to be as naturalistic as possible and comparable to the procedure at a professional photo studio, people are usually not instructed by others to prepare such pictures in real life, unless they discuss the picture detail with the photographer or other people. Therefore, future research should also investigate manifestations of face-ism in real life, for instance, by asking women and men how they select and design self-portraits for use in social media (such as profile pictures in professional networks) or for use in resumes, especially with respect to the face-to-body ratio of their portraits.

Moreover, the present research is limited to a student sample, studies with non-student populations would be necessary to generalize the present findings. This is of particular importance, as past research has shown that age and (occupational) status may moderate face-ism effects on professional networking websites (Szillis and Stahlberg, 2007 ; Read et al., 2017 ).

The observed face-ism effect in the present laboratory study is in line with face-ism effects consistently found on professional networking platforms in naturalistic studies (i.e., official websites of politicians and professors; Konrath and Schwarz, 2007 ; Szillis and Stahlberg, 2007 ; Konrath et al., 2012 ). Other research has also documented face-ism effects on social networking platforms (such as Facebook, MySpace, VKontakte; Reichart Smith and Cooley, 2012 ; Cooley and Reichart Smith, 2013 ). But the opposite effect has also been observed in social networks: Women displayed more facial prominence than men, in that they preferred to add portrait photos to their profiles, while men chose full-body shots (on StudiVZ, a German equivalent of Facebook; Haferkamp et al., 2012 ). Similarly, younger women (18 to 24 years) presented themselves with higher facial prominence than younger men on online dating sites, while no gender difference occurred in the middle-aged group (25 to 41 years) and face-ism occurred in the older-aged group (men over 41 years presented themselves with more facial prominence in their dating profiles than women over 41; Prieler and Kohlbacher, 2017 ). Recent research shows that people actually choose different images for dating, Facebook, and professional contexts suggesting that they aim for different impressions in the different contexts (White et al., 2017 ). Obviously, face-ism varies with context and with people's particular goals of self-presentation, therefore future research needs to investigate specific explanations for face-ism in the different contexts.

To conclude, the present research provides first evidence that women and men themselves create face-ism effects in their profile pictures for a professional network in social media, over and above the influence of photographers. Since facial prominence evoked by pictures in social media can have crucial positive and negative consequences for network users, it is important to further investigate face-ism and the underlying mechanisms in women's and men's self-presentation in social media.

Author contributions

SS developed the initial research idea and the concrete study concept was generated by both authors. SS and MK performed the data analysis and interpreted the results. SS drafted the manuscript, and MK provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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KATHERINE A. M. SNYDER, MD, AND ADAM D. VOELCKERS, MD

Am Fam Physician. 2024;109(3):212-216

This is part I of a two-part article on newborn skin. “ Newborn Skin: Part II. Birthmarks ,” appears in this issue of AFP .

Author disclosure: No relevant financial relationships.

Rashes in the newborn period are common and most are benign. Infections should be suspected in newborns with pustules or vesicles, especially in those who are not well-appearing or have risk factors for congenital infection. Congenital cytomegalovirus infection can cause sensorineural hearing loss and neurodevelopmental delay. Skin manifestations of cytomegalovirus may include petechiae due to thrombocytopenia. The most common skin manifestations of early congenital syphilis are small, copper-red, maculopapular lesions located primarily on the hands and feet that peel and crust over three weeks. Erythema toxicum neonatorum and neonatal pustular melanosis are transient pustular rashes with characteristic appearance and distribution. Neonatal acne is self-limited, whereas infantile acne may benefit from treatment. Milia can be differentiated from neonatal acne by their presence at birth. Cutis marmorata and harlequin color change are transient vascular phenomena resulting from inappropriate or exaggerated dilation of capillaries and venules in response to stimuli.

Skin findings in newborns can present a diagnostic challenge in distinguishing common, benign rashes from those associated with infection, malignancy, or systemic syndromes. When clinicians evaluate the newborn rash, the most important skill is to recognize when further evaluation is necessary because early diagnosis and treatment can have a significant impact on morbidity and mortality. Part I of this article reviews the presentation, prognosis, and treatment of the most common rashes and skin changes that present during the first four weeks of life. Part II of this article, which appears in this issue of American Family Physician , discusses the identification and management of birthmarks that appear in newborns. 1

Transient Rashes

Infectious causes of transient rashes, such as Candida infections or congenital cytomegalovirus, should be a primary consideration. A rash consistent with one of the classic benign presentations in the well-appearing newborn can be monitored for resolution. Risk factors for congenital infections should be considered before the diagnosis of a benign rash.

INFECTIOUS CAUSES

Congenital infections may present with vesicles or pustules and can generally be distinguished based on presentation ( Table 1 ) . 2 – 8 Diffuse papular or vesicular rashes due to bacterial infections will often be associated with clinical signs of sepsis. 2

Congenital Candida infections are rare and cause a desquamating, maculopapular, papulopustular, or erythematous diffuse rash that presents at birth or in the first week of life. Prompt treatment with systemic antifungals can prevent disseminated candidemia. 3

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) is a potentially devastating infection for the newborn and can be effectively treated with prompt recognition. Most newborns who are infected with HSV in the peripartum period have a birthing parent with no known history of HSV. Neonatal HSV can present with disseminated disease, central nervous system disease, or cutaneous infection of the skin, eyes, and mouth. HSV skin vesicles typically present at approximately 12 days of life and are associated with lethargy and fever in an ill-appearing child. 4 An evaluation for HSV in these cases should not be delayed.

Congenital cytomegalovirus infections can cause sensorineural hearing loss and neurodevelopmental delay. Presentation is variable; 90% of newborns affected by cytomegalovirus are asymptomatic. Skin manifestations may include petechiae due to thrombocytopenia. Newborns with symptoms are more likely to suffer permanent sequelae. 5 Diagnostic testing in newborns is performed with a saliva sample in the first two to three weeks of life. 6

Previously considered a rare disease, congenital syphilis has steadily increased in incidence and geographic distribution since 2013. 7 The most common skin manifestations of early congenital syphilis are small, copper-red, maculopapular lesions located primarily on the hands and feet that peel and crust over three weeks. 7 Diagnosis is based on a quantitative comparison of nontreponemal serologic titers in the birthing parent and neonate. 7 Penicillin is the treatment of choice. 8

ERYTHEMA TOXICUM NEONATORUM

Erythema toxicum is a benign rash that may cause a caregiver to have concern that it is a more serious condition ( Figure 1 ) . It is the most common pustular newborn rash and affects approximately one-half of newborns; it is more common in those who are full-term. 9 , 10 Lesions may be present at birth but more often appear in the first few days of life. 11 Lesions may present as papules, followed by the development of small pustules with a large red base that are not in groups and are located on the face, trunk, and extremities. Lesions are not found on the palms or soles. 2 Diagnosis is made clinically in well-appearing newborns, although a peripheral smear that contains eosinophils may help confirm the diagnosis. 2 No treatment is required, and the rash should resolve with no scarring in one to two weeks.

TRANSIENT NEONATAL PUSTULAR MELANOSIS

Transient neonatal pustular melanosis is more common in newborns with skin containing higher levels of melanin. It is a pustular rash that is present at birth. The pustules rupture and leave a characteristic pigmented macule ( Figure 2 ) . The rash is diagnosed clinically by lesions that may appear on the forehead, behind the ears, and on the neck, trunk, and extremities, including the palms and soles. 12 Hyperpigmentation may persist for weeks to months before fading. 2

NEONATAL AND INFANTILE ACNE

Neonatal acne presents with closed comedones on the forehead, nose, and cheeks that may appear pustular ( Figure 3 ) . It is not present at birth, but develops in the first four weeks of life. 13 Neonatal acne is thought to be a result of sebaceous gland stimulation from newborn exposure to adult levels of endogenous hormones. Infantile acne generally presents after six weeks, lasts for six to 12 months, and may be more inflammatory in nature. 14 Infantile acne does not require further evaluation in the absence of other signs of hormonal excess. Infantile acne rarely requires treatment; however, topical antimicrobials or retinoids may be used in consultation with a specialist for severe or refractory cases and concerns for scarring. 15

Milia consists of tiny, pearly white to yellow cysts located on the forehead, nose, and cheeks, although they can appear in other locations ( Figure 4 ) . They are secondary to retained keratin and present at birth in up to one-half of newborns. Treatment is not needed. 2 , 16

Transient Vascular Phenomena

Transient vascular phenomena are visual representations of inappropriate or exaggerated dilation of normally formed blood vessels in response to an environmental stimulus.

CUTIS MARMORATA

Cutis marmorata is a physiologic phenomenon that presents as a reticular, bluish rash with symmetrical distribution on the trunk and extremities ( Figure 5 ) . It is caused by the dilation of capillaries and venules in response to cold temperatures. It can occur for weeks after birth and will disappear in warm temperatures. 17

Cutis marmorata telangiectatica congenita is a serious vascular anomaly that mimics physiologic cutis marmorata. Although the rash may appear similar in both conditions, cutis marmorata telangiectatica congenita should be considered if there is skin atrophy, ulceration, or unilateral distribution. 17 Referral is indicated when the diagnosis is uncertain.

HARLEQUIN COLOR CHANGE

Harlequin color change affects up to 10% of newborns, especially those who are preterm or small for gestational age. 18 It presents as transient, clearly demarcated areas in which one-half of the body is pale, and the other is plethoric. It generally appears between the third and fifth day of life, can persist from 30 seconds to 20 minutes, and may disappear when the newborn cries. 19 It is a benign, cutaneous condition that is thought to be secondary to vasomotor instability from an immature hypothalamus. It requires no specific evaluation or treatment. 19 , 20

This article updates a previous article on this topic by O’Connor, et al. 2

Data Sources: A PubMed search was completed using the terms congenital infections, erythema toxicum neonatorum, transient neonatal pustular melanosis, neonatal and infantile acne, milia, cutis marmorata, harlequin color change, and key terms for diagnosis and management. The search included meta-analyses, randomized controlled trials, clinical trials, and reviews. The Cochrane database, UpToDate, Essential Evidence Plus, and the TRIP database were also searched. Search dates: November 2022 to February 2023, May to June 2023, and December 2023.

The authors thank the patients’ families who allowed their newborns to be photographed for this article.

Snyder KAM, Voelckers AD. Newborn skin: part II. Birthmarks. Am Fam Physician. 2024;109(3):217-221.

O’Connor NR, McLaughlin MR, Ham P. Newborn skin: part I. Common rashes. Am Fam Physician. 2008;77(1):47-52.

Kaufman DA, Coggins SA, Zanelli SA, et al. Congenital cutaneous candidiasis: prompt systemic treatment is associated with improved outcomes in neonates [published correction appears in Clin Infect Dis . 2017; 65(8): 1431–1433]. Clin Infect Dis. 2017;64(10):1387-1395.

Kabani N, Kimberlin DW. Neonatal herpes simplex virus infection. Neoreviews. 2018;19(2):e89-e96.

Kabani N, Ross SA. Congenital cytomegalovirus infection. J Infect Dis. 2020;221(suppl1):S9-S14.

Fowler KB, Boppana SB. Congenital cytomegalovirus infection. Semin Perinatol. 2018;42(3):149-154.

Woods CR. Syphilis in children: congenital and acquired. Semin Pediatr Infect Dis. 2005;16(4):245-257.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Congenital syphilis. Accessed July 1 1, 2023. https://cdc.gov/std/treatment-guidelines/congenital-syphilis.htm

Erdle SC, O’Brien K. A neonate with blisters. Pediatr Rev. 2020;41(suppl 1):S27-S29.

Kanada KN, Merin MR, Munden A, et al. A prospective study of cutaneous findings in newborns in the United States: correlation with race, ethnicity, and gestational status using updated classification and nomenclature. J Pediatr. 2012;161(2):240-245.

Haveri FTTS, Inamadar AC. A cross-sectional prospective study of cutaneous lesions in newborn. ISRN Dermatol. 2014;2014:360590.

Dinulos JG, Graham EA. Influence of culture and pigment on skin conditions in children. Pediatr Rev. 1998;19(8):268-275.

Greydanus DE, Azmeh R, Cabral MD, et al. Acne in the first three decades of life: an update of a disorder with profound implications for all decades of life. Dis Mon. 2021;67(4):101103.

Serna-Tamayo C, Janniger CK, Micali G, et al. Neonatal and infantile acne vulgaris: an update. Cutis. 2014;94(1):13-16.

Eichenfield LF, Krakowski AC, Piggott C, et al.; American Acne and Rosacea Society. Evidence-based recommendations for the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric acne. Pediatrics. 2013;131(suppl 3):S163-S186.

Gallardo Avila PP, Mendez MD. Milia. StatPearls . Updated January 31, 2023. Accessed November 15, 2022. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK560481/

Null E, Clarey D, Warrack S. Diffuse reticulated rash in a newborn. Pediatr Rev. 2021;42(suppl2):151-154.

Januário G, Salgado M. The harlequin phenomenon. J Eur Acad Dermatol Venereol. 2011;25(12):1381-1384.

Velayuthan S, Sankararaman S. Visual diagnosis: newborn who has unilateral color change. Diagnosis: harlequin color change. Pediatr Rev. 2013;34(7):e25-e26.

Valerio E, Barlotta A, Lorenzon E, et al. Harlequin color change: neonatal case series and brief literature review. AJP Rep. 2015;5(1):e73-e76.

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Princess Kate’s Cancer: A Timeline of the Last Few Months

After months of speculation about her whereabouts, Catherine, Princess of Wales, announced that she is being treated for an undisclosed type of cancer.

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By Derrick Bryson Taylor

Reporting from London

For months, nearly all eyes have been fixated on the ebbs and flows of the British royal family, with King Charles III and Catherine, the Princess of Wales, in the spotlight because of health matters.

But the extended absence of Kate from the public eye and her slow re-emergence propelled a tidal wave of rumors over her whereabouts,. On Friday, she revealed in a video message that she has been diagnosed with cancer and is receiving chemotherapy.

Here is a quick timeline to help you catch up.

Dec. 25, 2023

Kate attends her last public event for a while.

Kate’s last official public appearance was on Christmas Day, when she attended a church service at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, Norfolk, England.

She was photographed wearing head-to-toe royal blue while walking to the church alongside her husband, Prince William, and their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, as they routinely do each Christmas. The entire family coordinated in blue and green.

Jan. 17, 2024

Kate undergoes surgery.

A little more than three weeks later, on Jan. 17, Kensington Palace announced that Kate had been admitted to the London Clinic to have abdominal surgery . Officials gave few details about her health but said the surgery was successful, and that her condition was “not cancerous.” She was expected to remain hospitalized for up to two weeks.

Hours later, Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles III would be treated for an enlarged prostate.

Jan. 18, 2024

William visits Kate at the London Clinic.

The next day, William was photographed driving himself away from the hospital, where Kate was recovering from abdominal surgery.

Jan. 29, 2024

Kate is released from the hospital.

Almost two weeks later, Kate returned home to Windsor, just outside London . Kensington Palace officials said that she would convalesce at home for two to three months and would not resume her public duties until after Easter, at the end of March.

Unlike her father-in-law, King Charles III, who was photographed exiting the London Clinic after his procedure, there were no photographs of Kate leaving the clinic.

Feb. 5, 2024

King Charles is diagnosed with cancer.

Buckingham Palace officials announced in early February, just days after Charles had undergone treatment for an enlarged prostate, that the king had been diagnosed with cancer .

The palace did not share what form of cancer Charles has, but a palace official said it was not prostate cancer. Doctors had discovered the cancer during the earlier procedure.

March 4, 2024

Kate is spotted for the first time in months.

The public’s incessant thirst for information about Kate’s whereabouts and recovery reached a fever pitch in the first week of March. And around that time, TMZ published a grainy paparazzi shot of Kate riding in a car driven by her mother.

It was the first time Kate had been seen since her hospitalization. Despite the photograph circulating on the internet, British newspapers and broadcasters did not republish it, citing Kate’s request for privacy during her convalescence — though they did report on the sighting.

March 10, 2024

Kate and her children appear in a Mother’s Day photograph.

To mark Mother’s Day in Britain, nearly two months after her abdominal surgery, Kensington Palace released an official photograph of a smiling Kate surrounded by her three children, George, Charlotte and Louis. The palace did not give many details about the picture except that it was taken by William last week in Windsor, where the family lives in Adelaide Cottage, on the grounds of Windsor Castle.

While the picture was meant to highlight a happy family on the holiday and quell rumors, it became a subject of intense scrutiny after The Associated Press, and several other photo agencies, issued a “kill order,” asking its clients to remove it from all platforms over concerns that it had been manipulated. The New York Times, which had initially used the picture in a story, also removed it.

March 11, 2024

Kate apologizes for the altered family photo.

Kate took the blame and apologized for the Mother’s Day photo fiasco.

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she said on social media. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

Kate is known as a photography enthusiast, and the palace often distributes her photos of the family. Palace officials stressed that Kate made minor adjustments for what was intended to be an informal family picture that was taken by William.

March 11 and March 18, 2024

Kate is spotted twice more.

Hours after Kate apologized for the photo edit, she was photographed alongside William leaving Windsor Castle.

The grainy photo that was widely published across the internet, showed Kate gazing away from the camera out of the window.

The next week, the couple was spotted again. This time in an unauthenticated video, walking outside a food shop near their home in Windsor. The video, captured by an onlooker, showed the couple carrying bags and wearing comfortable, dark clothing, blending into the crowd.

March 18, 2024

Another royal photo is flagged.

Getty Images placed an editorial advisory on a second royal family photo, this time an image of Queen Elizabeth II, flanked by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The photo — taken by Kate at Balmoral Castle in Scotland in August 2022 and released in 2023 on what would have been the queen’s 97th birthday — had been “digitally enhanced” before it was released by the palace, the photo agency said.

March 22, 2024

Kate reveals her diagnosis.

In a pre-recorded video broadcast on the BBC, Kate said she had been diagnosed with cancer and had begun chemotherapy. She described the past two months as “incredibly tough for our entire family.”

Like the king, the 42-year-old princess did not specify the type of cancer, but she asked the public and media to respect her desire for privacy, describing her illness as “a huge shock.”

She also asked for “time, space and privacy while I complete my treatment.” She said that she and William had needed time to explain everything to their children and “reassure them that I am going to be OK.”

Derrick Bryson Taylor is a general assignment reporter. He previously worked at The New York Post’s PageSix.com and Essence magazine. More about Derrick Bryson Taylor