LECTURE 9: IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT

Etruscan: phersu (mask)  Latin: persona (dramatic performance)  English: person

$250 billion beauty care industry, $40 billion cosmetic surgery industry

Experiment:

- Actual photo vs gradient of extra beautiful OR less beautiful

- Which one of the photos is you?
o Not picking the actual photo – choose more beautiful one!
- Mirror image: ignore or obsess with crappy parts of face

S ELF -ENHAN CE ME NT

- People are more likely to recognise their attractive morphed face as their own out of the
line-up
- They’re also faster to identify their attractively morphed photo out of a line-up of
distractor faces
o Detect themselves as 20% more beautiful
- When asked to compare ourselves against “typical people” or the “average people”, we
report very positive self-views
o 93% of drivers think they’re better than average
 Sometimes have crisis of confidence – self-confidence collapses, but
generally people have robust negative view of other people
o Only 1% of people rate their marriage as worse than most
 Robust sense
o Jailed criminals think the are kinder, more trustworthy, and honest than the
general public – robust effect
Why do we do it?
- How much disparity in wealth in countries = Gini coefficient (higher score = greater
discrepancy)
o People in West think that Western countries = high disparity in wealth, but in
fact intensity of developed countries = greater disparity between rich & poor
- The greater the discrepancy in wealth, more self-enhancement
o Don’t see in Japan
- High inequality, got more competitiveness = have to have your game faced on  make
yourself feel good about tough situation + improve yourself in world “positive robust self-
esteem”
SEL F-HAN DICAP PING
- Self-handicapping is a strategy by which people invite obstacles in the hopes of keeping
potential failure from hurting their self-esteem
o Not trying to avoid future failure

- It feels good (accurate self-appraisers are also more likely to be depressed)

o Depressed people accurate in self-perceived
- Believing our enhanced self enables us to better convince others of our awesomeness
o Helping fool others + lies = make others think us as great

- Self-handicapping can be self-claimed (e.g., claiming poor health) … or it can be achieved
through behaviour – defence mechanism
o Withdrawing effort: not trying before doing something
o Alcohol consumption: defence mechanism in threatening situations
o Procrastination: put thing off, plastic cycle = protecting image from failure
o Refusing to practice: refusing to study
o Choosing unobtainable goals: aimed so high – fail
Testing self-handicapping
- Self-handicapping has been examined using a range of methods: interview, self-report
scales, & “catching” self-handicapping in the lab
- Choose between two pills prior doing task:
o Performance-enhancing drug
o Performance-inhibiting drug
- When get a tough task = people should be taking performance-enhancing drug to get
better performance, BUT people are more likely to take performance-inhibiting drug
[excuse their failure]
Self-handicapping is most common:
- Among boys
- Among low achievers = guarantee to make you score poorly
- Among those who are motivated by “extrinsic goals”:
o curious about something vs wanted to pass degree
- Among people with entity beliefs about achievement
o Belief of certain level of IQ or confidence, not going to be better – if I fail then
that’s it
Impostors = power of ritual thinking – want to be real
- “It does not occur us to ask whether the masked figure poised with a knife over our
unconscious naked body is really a doctor” (Sarah Burton) – impostor blindness
- We are slow to suspect (“impostor blindness”)
o Partly because people are influenced by superficial characteristic; partly
because big lies are sometimes more plausible than little ones (he would not
lie about that, surely)
- Billy Tipton = born a woman but live as man – when died people figured out that he is a
woman
- Hannah Snell = live as a woman & biologically woman, then live as a man – trying to get
into British
- Nev Schuman = catfish by Angela
The world is a stage, life is a drama – Erving Goffman
ATT RACT IN G OTHERS…
- Unlike many other animals, humans don’t have obvious physical signs that they’re at a
fertile part of their cycle
- But changes do occur, much of it beyond conscious awareness… for roughly six days mid-
cycle women dress more provocatively, flirt more (with high-quality partners only) and
show tiny shifts in voice pitch, scent and skin tone
- Men may notice these changes (unconsciously)
o Jon Maner shows that men inched closer to a woman – and mimicked her
gestures more – when she was ovulating
RICHARD RONAY
- Got skateboarders to do tricks in front of either a beautiful female research assistant or a
male assistant
- In front of the beautiful woman they took more risk, leading to both more successful
tricks and more crash landing and aborted tricks
o Wanted to stand out from crowd
o The effect was partly mediated by increases in testosterone
GRISKEVICIUS ET AL (2009)
- Gave participants a “dating prime” or did not.
 - Women who were given the dating prime conformed more
- Men who were given the dating prime conformed less
- Subsequent research suggests that these instincts might be flawed (Hornsey et al., 2015)
GRISKEVICIUS ET AL (2006)
- Both men and women were given a dating prime produced more creative stories,
paintings & cartoons than those who had not, even when they couldn’t benefit from that
performance in the immediate context
- For women, the effect only emerged if they were asked to think about attracting a high-
quality, long-term mate
“Women think that men prefer the conformist target, but men actually prefer the non-conformist
target”
In a follow-up experiment, participants were led to believe that they were part of an online chat
group rating patterns.
- Non-conformist targets were seen as more datable and attractive than conformist
targets, an effect that was particularly strong when men rated women
- Opposite of traditional stereotype
GRISKEVICIUS STUDY
- MEN: inducing mating goals increased willingness to spend on conspicuous luxuries, but
not on the basis of necessities
o To communicate their wealth
- WOMEN: mating goals boosted public – but not private – helping
o Showing that you’re prosocial, agreeable
- Although mating motivation did not generally inspire helping in men, it did induce more
helpfulness in contexts allowing men to display heroism or dominance
ROSENBERG & TUNNEY (2008)
- Showed that men used more low-frequency words after am imaginary encounter with a
young woman
- women use more high-frequency words – more plain way
INGRATIAT ION – PR AISING PE OPL E
Can you get ahead in life by “sucking up”?
- people senior to you are probably not going to see you as sucking up … they tend to take
praise on its merits
o but people on your level and below you probably will see it as sucking up, and
this can backfire
- SLIME EFFECT: people who are seen to be “sucking up” (for senior) at the same time as
“kicking down” (the people below) are rated very negatively
SEL F-DEP RE CATION
- Leaders’ use of self-deprecating humour (or even group-deprecating humour) is positively
associated with ratings of transformational leadership as they minimise power
distinctions (whereas leaders’ use of aggressive humour makes things worse)
- BUT… works better for high power people (both in terms of winning support from work
colleagues and in terms of men attracting women)
- Self-deprecation can also backfire if it’s seen as inauthentic
THIN S LICE S
- Participants are exposed to 30 second soundless clips of doctors interacting with patients
o These participants’ ratings of the doctor’s “niceness” predict the likelihood of
that doctor getting sued
- Ratings of a teacher based on a short (6-30 second) soundless clip of a teacher interacting
with a class significantly predicts evaluations of that teacher at the end of semester by
students and principals
o How much student rate?
COMM UN ICAT IN G COMP ETEN CE
 In a sense, this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. In the end our conception of our
role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality” (Robert Park)

CLANCE & IMES: THE IMPOSTER PHENOMENON

- Women into career

Feeling like an impostor

- Correlational studies have shown that the feeling of being an impostor is related to:
o Self-reported depression
o Anxiety
o Low self-esteem
- Estimate of weight of people o Self-consciousness
- Show video & rate how confidence these people – significant (reliable): o Fear of success
o Speak - Compliment them
o Tone of voice - Feeling like an impostor can also occur when people attribute positive qualities to you
o Provide info relevant that you don’t feel you can live up to:
o Posture o “I actually was crumbling under that so-called banner of ‘strength in the face of
o Calm & relaxed adversity’. People just thought that I had this fighting spirit in me and I never
felt that … that I did. So, I felt like an impostor, really”
KROSS ET AL (2013): FACEBOOK IS DEPRESSING

- Sent text messages to participants five times per day

o How you feel?
- The more people used Facebook in the time between the two texts, the less happy they
felt
o Get worn down by collective impression management of everybody around you
- And, the more their overall satisfaction declined from the beginning of the study until its
end

Self-promotion on Facebook sites is correlated positively with narcissism … and negatively with self-
esteem (Mehdizadeh, 2010)

Authenticity  well-being

- Important in promoting happiness

- Faking authenticity = advertisement

“it’s in these roles that we know each other, ourselves …