Alan: I think we live our lives so afraid to be seen as weak that we die perhaps without ever having been seen at all. Denny, do you ever worry that when you die, people will never have truly known you?

Denny: I don’t want them to know me, I want them to believe my version.

David E. Kelley (2008), Boston Legal, “Tabloid Nation” April 8, 2008

We’ve been focusing primarily on the individual’s private view of her or his own self, but the self is as much a public entity as it is a private one. Life casts people into different social roles (child, student, patient) that are part of their cultural worldview, but those people also help create their own public personas. In fact, the word personality derives from the Greek word persona, a word originally used to describe the masks that Greek actors wore on stage to represent their characters’ current emotional state.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

William Shakespeare (English playwright, 1564–1616), As You Like It, act 2, scene 7

In books such as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), the sociologist Erving Goffman offered a dramaturgical perspective that uses the theater as a metaphor to understand how people behave in everyday social interactions. From this perspective, every social interaction involves self-presentation in which actors perform according to a script. If everyone involved knows the script and plays their parts well, then like a successful play, their social interactions flow smoothly and seem meaningful, and each actor benefits.

People learn their scripts and roles over the course of socialization. Parents, teachers, and the media teach children about weddings, funerals, school, parties, dates, concerts, wars, and so forth, long before they experience any of these things firsthand. Kids also learn how to be friends, teammates, students, and romantic partners. They play at various culturally valued adult roles such as astronaut, athlete, mother, doctor, teacher, or pop star. As a result of these and other socialization experiences, in every social situation there is a working consensus, an implicit agreement about who plays which role and how it should be played.

The social context defines a person’s role, fellow performers, and audience. The power of the situation to define roles, perceptions, and behavior was vividly demonstrated when, in 2007, the Washington Post journalist Gene Weingarten persuaded the internationally acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell to play for nearly an hour in a crowded Washington, DC Metro station. Three nights earlier, in the impressive setting of a sold-out concert hall, Bell took on the role of virtuoso. The listeners played their role, sitting in their seats (for which they paid $100) and stifling their coughs during the performance. But although he filled the Metro station with the same virtuosity, here Bell took on the role of the panhandler, and passersby played their part by ignoring him. Only seven people actually stopped to listen. Indeed, Bell suddenly found his very identity threatened. He said, “When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence?” (Weingarten, 2007).

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Sincere versus Cynical Performances

Many of the situations people encounter are so familiar that they are not consciously aware that they’re playing a role or following a script. In a classroom, for instance, you automatically take on the student role. Goffman refers to these well-practiced scripts as sincere performances. But when something goes awry, when someone doesn’t play his or her role properly, then people become aware of the implicit rules and norms they’ve been following automatically all along.

In contrast to sincere performances, cynical performances are conscious attempts to perform in a certain way to make a particular impression. People are more likely to engage in such performances when they find themselves in unfamiliar territory or when they want to convey a specific impression. Think back to your first day of college. You probably did a lot of preparation, thinking about what to expect, how to dress, and so on. When you arrived, you were probably fairly self-conscious, thinking about how to act and what to say. Job interviews and first dates are other good examples of cynical performances. Cynical performances can turn into sincere performances as they become increasingly familiar and more rehearsed.

Are people always performing? Goffman would say yes. Even when you wish to be most genuine—for example, when offering condolences to a friend whose father has died—you still rely on scripts to express your true feelings of sympathy and offer comfort. You may end up drawing on phrases you’ve seen used in movies or even read in sympathy cards. So for Goffman, performing and self-presentation are not primarily done to be phony or manipulative (although sometimes they are) but simply to accomplish the goal that is important to a person in a particular social situation.

Self-presentational Strategies

Honing an Image

Jones and Pittman (1982) described some common strategies we use to meet our self-presentational goals. To appear competent, we advertise our achievements through self-promotion. But self-promotion can backfire if its comes off as too boastful (e.g., Wosinka et al., 1996). Supplication involves revealing a little personal weakness, usually as a way to garner sympathy. When we simply want people to like us, we often use ingratiation, such as by flattering others, which is generally quite effective (e.g., Jones & Wortman, 1973). We also ingratiate ourselves to others by presenting ourselves as like them (Gordon, 1996). But sprinkling in a little disagreement can help us come across as more sincere and create a better impression overall (e.g., Jones, 1990; Jones et al., 1963). Finally, in certain situations, people—more often men—turn to intimidation to create an image of power and strength (Jones & Pittman, 1982).

Audience Segregation

In their everyday lives, people have to stay in character to uphold a particular public identity with a given audience. Goffman pointed out that people do so in part by keeping different audiences segregated so that they can perform consistently with each audience. If you have ever worked in a restaurant, you’d know that wait staff act very differently in the kitchen than they do out on the floor.

Similarly, at the mall with your parents, you’d probably rather not run into your friends. Your style of speaking, the words you use, the way you dress, and even your body posture are likely to be different when you’re with your parents than when you’re with your friends. How do you give two different performances at once? Faced with such a multiple audience problem, sometimes people use different communication channels to convey different self-images. For one, you may at some point find yourself flattering someone on the phone while rolling your eyes for a friend who is with you (Fleming & Rudman, 1993). A second option would be for you to adopt a compromise position on an issue when two present audiences have opposite views (e.g., Braver et al., 1977). Leaf Van Boven and colleagues (2000) investigated a third solution by asking participants to convey an image of being a nerd to one fellow student and a party animal to another. When forced to discuss college life in the presence of both students, the participants used ambiguous statements such as “Saturdays are good for one thing and one thing only.” Although people use such strategies, they find multiple-audience situations very difficult, and people are not nearly so effective as they think they are at sustaining different identities simultaneously (Fleming et al., 1990; Van Boven et al., 2000).

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Lying

One fundamental goal in self-presentation is to maintain face, a person’s sense of public value. Every social encounter brings with it the risk of losing face if the person slips up or says or does the wrong thing. Fortunately, when this happens, people often tactfully work cooperatively with the person to help him or her to save face and maintain a positive self-image. Individuals often minimize threats to someone else’s face out of empathy and kindness, but this tactic also helps social interactions flow smoothly and increases the likelihood that such tact will be reciprocated.

Because of the importance of protecting face, people often bend the truth. For example, you may assure someone that his presentation went well when in fact it put you to sleep. This perspective suggests that lying is pretty common and often motivated by the need to protect face—our own and others’—rather than intentionally harming or manipulating others. A study by Bella DePaulo and colleagues (1996) found considerable support for these ideas. Participants were given little notebooks and instructed over a week to record any and all lies, and the reasons for telling them.

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At this point you might be thinking, “Wow, I can really see how much I self-present.” Or you might think, “I don’t care enough about what other people think to do this kind of stuff.” Such varied reactions reflect how people differ both in their sensitivity to how others see them and how motivated they are to put effort into strategic self-presentation. This individual difference is known as self-monitoring (Snyder & Gangestad, 1986). People high in self-monitoring are social chameleons, adjusting their appearance and behavior to fit with the norms and expectations in a given situation. Those low in self-monitoring seem to march to the beat of their own drum, ignoring other people’s expectations and doing what feels true to them.

People who are high in self-monitoring are better at what we called cynical performances—that is, they are able to change their expression, vocal tone, and mannerisms strategically to convey a certain character (Snyder, 1974). They also tend to have more friends, though these friendships are often less close and more short-term, but fewer long-lasting romantic relationships. Low self-monitors present themselves in a more consistent way, so their behavior stems not so much from what the situation might demand but from their own inner states and desired self-image. This means their behavior is more stable across situations. In fact, low self-monitors are more likely to choose situations where they can just be themselves.

Does careful self-monitoring ensure that people accurately understand the impression their audience is forming of them? Unfortunately, people often have difficulty getting beyond their own subjective experience when judging how others view them. In one study, a college student wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt was sent into a room of observers. After being in front of the observers for under a minute, the average participant in this study estimated that close to 50% of the people in the room must have noticed the shirt. In fact, reports by the observers showed that only about 25% actually did. Because the participants were acutely aware of sporting the Barry Manilow attire, they falsely inferred that the rest of the world noticed as well. This is known as the spotlight effect—the belief that others are more focused on the self than they actually are (Gilovich et al., 2000). So, when we are very self-conscious of some aspect of self, we are prone to the spotlight effect. But when we are not self-conscious about some unusual aspect of self, the opposite may occur. For example, when participants wore the T-shirts for a while before entering the room of observers (so that it was no longer so salient to them), they underestimated the amount of people who would notice.

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Such egocentric bias doesn’t just lead people to mistake whether others notice aspects of their external appearance. It also leads people to overestimate others’ ability to know their internal thoughts and feelings. Imagine a situation where you smile politely as you choke down bite after bite of a friend’s new, but decidedly vile, recipe. Many of us imagine that our disgust is laid out on the table for everyone to see. According to Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec (1998), this is probably only an illusion of transparency, because people are often better than they think they are at hiding their internal feelings. This is something to keep in mind the next time you get nervous about giving a speech or doing something in public. In fact, even when peopie rate themselves as being a jittery ball of nerves, those who observe their speech often rate them as appearing less anxious (Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003).

Why is self-presentation so prevalent and important? We often use self-presentation to achieve specific goals such as getting a job, impressing a date, and so on. But it also serves three broader goals. One is to protect your self-image. We’ve discussed how influential social feedback often is to self-esteem. A second goal is to support the meaningfulness of social interactions by properly enacting the culture’s scripts and roles. Finally, self-presentation also serves self-improvement and personal growth. Goffman (1959) noted that people often use idealization to convey a best-case view of oneself to others. To quote the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1902, p. 352), “If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we improve or ‘train ourselves from the outside inward?’”

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