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Privately self-conscious people may resist social pressures because (a) they tune out the social matrix and express their beliefs irrespective of how they make them appear to an audience (the social obliviousness hypothesis) or (b) they prefer to create an identity of being autonomous and will monitor and control their self-presentations to construct this image for audiences (the autonomous identity hypothesis). The results of three studies supported the latter. The self-identifications of privately self-conscious subjects emphasized autonomy and personal identity, whereas those of publicly self-conscious subjects emphasized conformity, social identity, and social trepidations. An experiment found that privately self-conscious subjects publicly changed their attitudes if by so doing they protected the appearance of autonomy.Private and public self-consciousness are often characterized as exemplars of contrasting styles of self-regulation (Buss, 1980;

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This article provides an overview of science communication, which is a vital area of mass communication scholarship. The review is organized around the key players, including news organizations, reporters, science information professionals, scientists, and audiences. Also reviewed is the problem of science communication, which may be partly responsible for widespread science illiteracy. Ways of improving the practice of science communication and an agenda for future research are offered.

This study examined the attributions of Ss high (HSEs) and low (LSEs) in self-esteem in contexts where (a) they were low or high in the motivation to make a positive impression on an audience, (b) the audience was perceived as supportive or critical, (c) Ss' accounts were public or private, and (d) Ss had succeeded or failed on a previous task. Overall, Ss displayed pronounced and pervasive egotistical biases, but the social context influenced the magnitude of the bias. HSEs were most egotistical when evaluative pressures were greatest (i.e., they were motivated to make a good impression and had the opportunity to account publicly), whereas LSEs were least egotistical under these conditions. HSEs tended to internalize success by raising their self-ratings, whereas LSEs tended to internalize failure by lowering their self-ratings. In general, a critical audience seemed to activate concerns about the defensibility of attributions, producing more caution and less explicit boastfulness. Factor analysis of subjects' responses suggested that they conceptualized the situation in terms of its implications for evaluating identity.The tendency for people to associate themselves with desirable events and dissociate themselves from undesirable events is amply documented (Schlenker, 1980). A well-known example is the tendency for people to take greater personal responsibility for successes than failures, attributing personal successes disproportionately to identity-relevant factors, such as ability and effort, yet attributing failures to identity-irrelevant factors, such as bad luck and task difficulty (e.g.,