Helping New Acquaintances Make the Right Impression: Balancing Image Concerns of Others and Self

Abstract

People strategically regulate information about the identities of friends to help those friends create desired impressions on audiences. Are people willing to help acquaintances manage their impressions, and if so, are such efforts moderated by the helper's own self-presentational concerns? Participants were 234 same-sex strangers who went through a structured self-disclosure procedure designed to induce psychological closeness. They later described this partner to an opposite-sex third party who supposedly preferred either extraverts or introverts as ideal dates, and who their partner regarded as attractive and wanted to impress or as unattractive and did not care to impress. As predicted, participants described their partners consistently with the preferences of the attractive other, but only when their own selfpresentational concerns about accuracy were low. If the third party was unattractive, participants whose accuracy concerns were low tended to describe their partners opposite the preferences of the other, suggesting they were ''not your type.'' The results indicated that beneficial impression management occurs even among acquaintances, but is held in check by self-presentational concerns about accuracy.

Managing social images in naturalistic versus laboratory settings: Implications for understanding and studying self‐presentation

“…One additional mode of everyday self‐presentation that is rarely studied deserves mention. People sometimes rely on others to help manage their impressions (Pontari & Schlenker, ; Schlenker & Britt, ; Schlenker, Lifka, & Wowra, ). Friends, romantic partners, family members, teachers, co‐workers, and others often convey information about us to other people and thus, can both help us to foster desired images and create self‐presentational predicaments as well.…”

The Source Effect: Person Descriptions by Self versus Others Have Differential Effects on Impression Formation

“…It is quite common that people provide information to an audience about others (e.g., Pontari & Schlenker, 2004;Schlenker & Britt, 1999;Schlenker, Lifka, & Wowra, 2004). This type of person information may in general be less susceptible to bias.…”

The “me” I claim to be: Cultural self-construal elicits self-presentational goal pursuit.

“…For instance, research has shown that self-presentations depend on others' knowledge of the presenter (Baumeister & Jones, 1978), accuracy concerns of the presenter (Schlenker, Lifka, & Wowra, 2004), gender of the audience (Pontari & Schlenker, 2003;Leary, Nezlek, Downs, RadfordDavenport, 1994), target familiarity (Leary et al, 1994), and dependence on the target (Jones et al, 1968). We seek to supplement this knowledge with a focus on how distinct cultural selfconstruals influence self-presentational goals and efforts.…”