Self-Presentation 337this: How favorably should one present oneself? People’s
answers appear to depend on several factors. In Schlenker’s
(1980, 1986) terms, self-presentation is often the result of
a trade-off between the opposing forces of favorability and
believability. People often make positive claims about
themselves in order to make a good impression. However,
excessively positive claims might not be believed, and they
could even be discredited. (For example, you could try to
make a good impression by saying you are a good basket-
ball player. Someone might not believe you, or worse, you
might later play basketball and perform poorly). Boasting
about one’s abilities and being proven wrong leaves a bad
impression.
In one of the earliest and most often cited experiments on
self-presentation, Schlenker (1975) gave participants moder-
ately negative feedback about their abilities on a novel task
prior to a session in which group members would perform
the task. Participants were then asked to describe them-
selves to the group members. Schlenker wanted to see if
participants would self-present in positive terms or incorpo-
rate the negative feedback they had just received. As it
turned out, the favorability of self-presentation depended on
whether the upcoming group performance was expected to
be public or private. If it would be private, so that no one
would know anyone else’s performance, then participants
presented themselves in rather favorable terms. If they
thought other people would be able to see how well they
did, however, they refrained from boasting. Thus, people
seemed to present themselves as favorably as they could get
away with: They boasted when it was safe to do so but re-
mained modest when it seemed likely that the truth would
be found out.
The possibility of future discreditation is not the only con-
straint on the favorability of self-presentation. It is also lim-
ited by past actions and other socially available information.
After all, people do not simply form wholly new impressions
of others with every single interaction. New information is
added to old information. The self-presenter must anticipate
this and know that whatever he or she does now will be
combined, in the observer’s mind, with what the observer
already knows.
An early study of the effects of prior knowledge on self-
presentation was conducted by Baumeister and Jones (1978).
Subjects were told that their interaction partners would read
their personality profiles. As in Schlenker’s (1975) study,
people felt constrained to be consistent with independent in-
formation. In this case, they altered their self-presentations to
fit the randomly assigned feedback. This occurred even when
the personality profiles were unfavorable. Yet they did not
leave the matter at that: They sought to compensate for the
unfavorable image of themselves by presenting themselves
extra-favorably on other, unrelated dimensions. Thus, people
felt constrained to be consistent with what the observer al-
ready knew about them, but they tried to compensate for a
bad impression by balancing it with unrelated, highly favor-
able information.
The general trend toward favorable self-presentation may
therefore have significant limits. An additional and quite im-
portant limit was identified by Tice, Butler, Muraven, and
Stillwell (1995). These authors pointed out that nearly all
self-presentation research had been done on first meetings
between strangers. However, the vast majority of actual so-
cial interactions take place between people who already
know each other. The studies they performed showed that
people tend to be positive and self-enhancing when interact-
ing with strangers, but they more modest and neutral when
presenting themselves to friends. This occurs in part because
of differences in the perceivers’ knowledge. Strangers know
nothing about you, and so it is necessary to convey one’s
good traits in order to make a favorable impression on them.
In addition, a stranger will not be able to dispute an overly fa-
vorable self-presentation. On the other hand, friends already
have substantial information about you, and so it is not nec-
essary to name all of your good traits. Meanwhile, friends
will know when you are exaggerating. Even if you are being
honest, friends will probably not respond well to bragging
and self-aggrandizement.Cognition and Self-PresentationDo people know what impressions they convey to others?
DePaulo et al. (1987) investigated that question by having
subjects interact in a round-robin pattern. Each subject
interacted with three others, one at a time, in interactions
structured around different tasks (e.g., a teaching task vs.
a competition). After each interaction, both subjects reported
their impressions of the partner and the impressions they
thought they had made on the partner. The researchers
were then able to determine whether there were discrepancies
in perceived versus actual impressions. The answers were
mixed. There was indeed significant accuracy, although most
of the correlations were rather low. People could tell in a gen-
eral way how the other persons’ impressions of them changed
over time. They were not, however, very effective at guessing
which partner liked them the most or perceived them as most
competent. In other words, people cannot often tell who likes
them the most. In another analysis, the authors found that
people believed that they had made similar impressions on
everyone in the group; in fact, different partners reported
very different impressions of the same person. People seem