Difficulty: Intermediate-Advanced | Prerequisites: Lectures 2-7 on the self, positive illusions, and social comparison.
Big Picture
These lectures cover how we present ourselves to others, how we protect our sense of self when threatened, how personality consistency works through situation-specific patterns, how goals drive behaviour, and how we regulate (and fail to regulate) our thoughts and actions. This is the applied engine of the self-concept material: moving from "what is the self?" to "what does the self do?"
TL;DR
Self-presentation is partly strategic and partly unconscious. When the self is threatened, self-affirmation in an unrelated domain can restore global self-integrity and reduce defensiveness. Personality consistency is found not in cross-situational averages but in if-then signatures (specific situation-behaviour contingencies). Goals are pursued through promotion or prevention focus, and implementation intentions (specifying when, where, and how) dramatically increase follow-through. Mental control is an ironic process: trying not to think something can make it more accessible, especially under cognitive load.
Self-presentation
Attempts to convey information or images about oneself to others. This can be strategic (to gain rewards) or identity-claiming (to establish who you are). In simple terms, it is impression management, the performance you give for your audience.
Self-verification (Swann)
The desire for others to see us as we see ourselves, even when our self-view is negative. People with low self-esteem prefer interaction partners who view them unfavourably because it feels predictable. Think of it as: we want to be known, not just praised.
Spotlight effect
The tendency to overestimate how much attention others pay to us, both for positive and negative behaviours. In simple terms, you are not in the spotlight as much as you think.
Self-affirmation theory (Steele)
The idea that we are motivated to maintain a global sense of self-integrity (being competent, moral, and adequate). When threatened in one domain, affirming an unrelated value can restore this global sense and eliminate defensive responses like cognitive dissonance or prejudice.
Cognitive dissonance (induced compliance)
The discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs or acting against one's attitudes. In the induced compliance paradigm, freely choosing to argue for a position you disagree with causes attitude change to reduce the inconsistency.
CAPS: Cognitive Affective Personality System (Mischel)
A theory that personality consistency lies not in behaving the same way across all situations, but in stable if-then patterns: specific situations reliably trigger specific behavioural responses for a given individual.
Personality signature
A distinctive pattern of if-then contingencies that characterises a person. Two people might have the same average level of aggression but show it in reliably different situations.
Implementation intentions (Gollwitzer)
Specific plans that pair a situation with an action: "when situation X arises, I will do Y." They address the gap between goal intention and goal achievement by creating a mental link that makes the planned behaviour automatic when the situation occurs.
Promotion vs. prevention focus (Higgins)
Promotion focus: pursuing hopes, aspirations, and ideals (growth-oriented). Prevention focus: meeting duties, obligations, and responsibilities (security-oriented). Achieving ideals brings happiness; failing brings dejection. Meeting oughts brings calm; failing brings anxiety.
Ironic process theory (Wegner)
The theory that trying to suppress a thought involves an intentional operating process (searching for distracting thoughts) and an automatic monitoring process (scanning for the unwanted thought). Under cognitive load, the monitor keeps running but the operator fails, making the suppressed thought hyper-accessible.
Self-monitoring (Snyder)
An individual difference in the degree to which people regulate their behaviour based on internal dispositions (low self-monitors) vs. situational cues (high self-monitors). Low self-monitors want the situation to fit them; high self-monitors want to fit the situation.
Reflected appraisals and the looking-glass self (Cooley, Mead)
Our self-view is supposed to be a reflection of how others see us. However, the correlation between our self-view and others' actual views is small. The correlation between our self-view and how we think others see us is much stronger. The gap exists because we overestimate the attention we attract, we distort feedback, and others do not always tell us what they really think.
Self-presentation strategies
From the self-presentation handbook: do not make conformity obvious, disagree on trivial issues, agree on important ones, be selectively modest, bask in reflected glory. The problem: none of this feels authentic.
People boast more when they cannot be called on it (performing privately rather than publicly). They boast more with strangers (who cannot verify claims) than with friends. When they cannot boast in the domain where they failed, they shift to a different domain.
Unconscious self-presentation
Much self-presentation happens without awareness. People spontaneously tone down their positivity when interacting with someone who is having a difficult time. Video-rated positivity changes across conditions, but self-reported positivity does not: we do not notice our own adjustments. Self-presentation can also backfire: women expecting to meet a traditionally-minded man performed worse on problem-solving tasks, even though the man would never see their scores.
Self-verification (Swann)
Swann challenged decades of research interpreted as evidence of self-enhancement. He argued that most studies used samples with positive self-views, so preferring positive feedback could reflect verification, not enhancement. When he studied people with genuinely low self-esteem, they chose (nearly 80% of the time) to interact with someone who viewed them unfavourably.
Automatic vs. controlled: our immediate response is to prefer positive feedback. Low self-esteem individuals then correct, realising "that feels good but that's not really me." High confidence in one's self-view strengthens the verification drive.
The spotlight effect
Students forced to wear an embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirt estimated that 45% of people in the room would notice. The actual figure was just over 20%. In group discussions, people overestimate both their positive contributions and their speech errors. The overestimation is systematic (it correlates with others' actual ratings), but the magnitude is inflated. We get our relative ranking roughly right but overestimate how much anyone noticed.
Global self-integrity
We care about maintaining a general sense that we are competent, moral, and adequate. Threats to any self-aspect (roles, values, group identities, goals, relationships, beliefs) create a problem for this global sense.
Self-affirmation and cognitive dissonance
Steele argued that we experience cognitive dissonance because inconsistency threatens the self ("I freely wrote an essay I disagree with, what does that make me?"). In the induced compliance paradigm, students asked to write essays supporting tuition increases showed attitude change to reduce dissonance, but only under high choice. When given the chance to affirm an important personal value (by writing about why it matters to them), dissonance-driven attitude change was eliminated.
The affirmation must be about values important to you. Writing about values important to someone else does not work. The effect also holds in the free-choice paradigm (spreading of alternatives after choosing between two similarly ranked items): self-affirmation eliminates the spreading.
Self-affirmation and prejudice (Fein and Spencer)
If prejudice partly serves self-enhancement (putting others down to feel good about yourself), then self-affirmation should reduce the need for prejudice. In a study at the University of Michigan, participants evaluated a job applicant presented as either Jewish or Italian. Without self-affirmation, participants rated the Italian applicant more positively. After affirming an important value, the prejudice disappeared.
The reverse also held: threatening participants' self-concept (negative feedback on an intellectual test) increased stereotyping of a target implied to be gay.
Broader applications of self-affirmation
Failure feedback normally increases rumination; self-affirmation eliminates it.
Biased assimilation (dismissing information that contradicts your views on capital punishment, abortion, etc.) is reduced by self-affirmation: people become more receptive to opposing arguments.
Self-affirmation works whether given before or after the negative feedback.
Symbolic self-completion (Gollwitzer)
Related to self-affirmation but focused on goals rather than self-esteem. When a goal tied to a self-definition is threatened, people compensate with other symbols of that identity. Female students told they did not fit the ideal profile for career women became faster to generate career-related ideas in brainstorming. Men who received negative feedback about a valued self-definition were unwilling to be modest about that domain, even when modesty would be socially advantageous (the "Debbie study"). The limit: if the threat is to something critically important, affirming a different domain may not be sufficient.
Mischel reviewed decades of research on traits predicting behaviour and found the average correlation was only about .16. This devastated personality psychology in the 1970s. But Mischel did not abandon personality; he proposed a more nuanced approach.
Cognitive Affective Personality System (CAPS)
Situations reliably trigger behavioural responses through cognitive-affective mediating units: encodings, expectancies, affects, goals/values, competencies, and plans/scripts. The same situation triggers different patterns in different people because of who they are. These unique patterns are "personality signatures."
The summer camp study
84 children were observed by 77 adults for an average of 167 hours each over six weeks. Mischel split observations into halves and tested whether the first half predicted the second.
Within-situation consistency was high: if peer teasing reliably elicited verbal aggression in the first half, it did so again in the second half (correlation around .4).
Cross-situation prediction was low (.16): knowing a child was aggressive when teased did not predict aggression across all situations.
Some interesting cross-behaviour patterns emerged: children who responded to positive peer contact with verbal aggression did so consistently, revealing something distinctive about those children.
If-then contingencies in relationships (Downey)
Rejection sensitivity: some people anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact to rejection. Downey developed a measure and found that high rejection-sensitive people interpret ambiguous partner behaviours as intentionally hurtful, become passive-aggressive, and ultimately drive partners away, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over one year, 43% of relationships with a high-sensitivity partner broke up vs. 15% of others.
If-then contingencies at the cultural level: Southern culture of honour
In the US South, there is a cultural norm that family and reputation must be protected, with violence if necessary. In a lab study, a confederate bumped participants and muttered an insult. Southern men (but not Northern men) showed increased cortisol and testosterone after the insult, filled in scenarios with more violent endings, and let a large approaching man get closer before stepping aside.
Goals as self-definition
Goals tell us not just what people strive for but who they are. They cannot be understood in isolation: goals form hierarchies, with sub-goals serving higher-order goals.
Expectancy-value models
The likelihood of pursuing a goal depends on the expectancy of success and the value of the outcome. The basic model multiplies the two: if either is low, commitment drops. Intrinsic psychological needs include relatedness, autonomy, and competence.
Four goal dimensions
Importance-commitment: how central the goal is to the self. More energy mobilised, more time willing to invest. Commitment increases when there is only one path to a higher-order goal (equifinality) or when a sub-goal serves multiple higher-order goals (multifinality).
Difficulty: influences expectancy. Commitment may cause people to downplay difficulty because accepting that a goal is too difficult has unpleasant implications.
Specificity: implementation intentions address the gap between wanting to do something and actually doing it.
Consciousness: goals move in and out of working memory. Early on, a goal may be highly conscious; once automatised, it drops below awareness and resurfaces when disrupted.
Implementation intentions (Gollwitzer)
Forming a specific plan (when, where, how) creates a mental association between a situation and an action. Christmas break studies: students who specified when, where, and how they would complete difficult goals were far more successful than those who were equally committed but did not form implementation plans. In a second study, students prompted to form implementation intentions were more than twice as likely to mail in an assigned essay.
Implementation intentions function like habits: one pairing of situation and behaviour can be as effective as weeks of habit formation. Habitual cyclists who saw location words were faster at cycling-related verbs; non-cyclists given implementation intentions showed the same reaction-time pattern.
Promotion vs. prevention focus (Higgins)
Promotion focus: pursuing ideals and aspirations. Achieving brings happiness; failing brings dejection. Requires both high expectancy and high value for commitment.
Prevention focus: meeting duties and obligations. Achieving brings calm; failing brings anxiety. Commitment requires only high expectancy or high value (not both). Important responsibilities are pursued even when expectancy is low.
In a study, students were told a course would help them "maximise being accepted" (promotion) or "minimise being rejected" (prevention). Promotion-focused students only enrolled if they expected to do well and saw value. Prevention-focused students enrolled if either condition was met.
The lifeguard and ER doctor examples illustrate when prevention focus is critical: you want the person saving a life to act even when the odds are low.
Deliberative vs. implemental mindsets (Gollwitzer)
Before committing to a goal, we are in a deliberative mindset: weighing pros and cons impartially. After committing, we shift to an implemental mindset: focused on execution, biased toward the chosen goal. Deliberative mindset reduces positive illusions (illusion of control, better-than-average bias). Implemental mindset increases them. In close relationships, deliberative mindset improved accuracy in predicting relationship survival, while implemental mindset made people optimistic even when relationships were failing.
Social norms
Norms reduce the cognitive load of daily decisions. They are dynamic, culturally defined, and enforced through social feedback. Sherif's autokinetic effect demonstrated convergence on subjective judgements. Asch's line study showed conformity to obviously wrong answers (75% conformed at least once; 25% never conformed).
Descriptive norms: what other people actually do. Injunctive norms: what is perceived as appropriate. Cialdini showed both matter for behaviour. In a littering study, a messy parking lot with a confederate who littered pushed littering above 50%. In energy consumption, giving people actual norms without injunctive information (smiley/frowny faces) caused below-average consumers to increase their usage. Adding injunctive information (a smiley face for being below average) prevented this boomerang effect.
Pluralistic ignorance: most group members privately disagree with a perceived norm but assume everyone else endorses it. University students guessed peer alcohol consumption at 12 drinks per week when the actual average was 2.
Mental control and ironic processes (Wegner)
The white bear experiment: participants asked to suppress thoughts of a white bear for five minutes were effective at suppression. The key finding was the rebound effect: when subsequently allowed to think freely, those who had suppressed thought about the white bear significantly more than those who had not suppressed first.
Wegner's explanation: suppression creates negative cueing (everything in the environment becomes associated with "not thinking about the white bear"). A focused distractor ("think about a red VW instead") eliminates the rebound by providing positive associations.
The three mental processes
State selection: what is the mental goal (what do I want to be thinking?).
Operating process: intentional, controlled search for thoughts matching the goal. Requires cognitive resources.
Monitoring process: automatic, less effortful, searches for thoughts that signal failure. When the operator is overloaded (time pressure, cognitive load, fatigue), monitored thoughts become hyper-accessible.
Evidence: under high time pressure on a word association task, people trying to suppress a target word produced it even more than people trying to concentrate on it. On the Stroop test under cognitive load, suppressed words created more interference than concentrated words.
Real-world applications of ironic processes
Secrets as obsessions: people in secret relationships reported more attraction to old partners. In a lab card game, partners who maintained secret foot contact rated each other as more attractive than those whose foot contact was public.
Hot flames vs. cold flames: actively suppressing thoughts of a current romantic interest produces emotional reactivity (not cognitive rebound). Suppressing thoughts of a past, extinguished interest produces cognitive rebound (like the white bear).
Goal shielding and temptation (Shah, Fishbach)
Commitment to a primary goal helps automatically inhibit thoughts of competing goals. Fishbach showed that temptations can actually activate the goal they threaten: dieters exposed to fattening food magazines were faster to recognise "diet" words and equally likely to choose an apple over a candy bar as those exposed to diet magazines.
The construct
Self-monitoring is an individual difference in how much people regulate behaviour based on internal dispositions versus situational cues. Low self-monitors are guided by their values, attitudes, and internal states. They want to be the same person across situations and want situations to fit them. High self-monitors are guided by cues in the situation and adapt to fit in. They are attuned to what the situation calls for.
Snyder considers self-monitoring categorical (high or low, not a continuum) and works from the extremes of the distribution.
The beard study
A researcher grew a beard and timed how long it took colleagues to notice. High self-monitoring friends noticed faster than low self-monitors, illustrating that highs attend more closely to external cues.
Attitudes predicting behaviour
The classic attitude-behaviour correlation was only about .30. Snyder proposed that low self-monitors use attitudes to guide behaviour more than highs do.
Harrison vs. University of Maine (affirmative action case): participants evaluated a court case after their attitudes toward affirmative action were measured. For low self-monitors, there was a strong correlation between attitude and judgement. For high self-monitors, the correlation was essentially zero. Knowing a high self-monitor's attitude told you nothing about their verdict.
Accessibility mattered for lows: when attitudes were made accessible (prompted to reflect on them), lows used them. Relevance mattered for highs: when told the case would set a precedent for affirmative action policy (making the attitude relevant to the situation), highs used their attitudes too.
Self-monitoring and social life
Friendships: low self-monitors preferred people who shared their attitudes (value similarity). High self-monitors preferred people who shared their activities (activity similarity). Lows chose companions they respected; highs chose companions they enjoyed doing things with.
Dating: low self-monitors took their partner everywhere regardless of the activity. High self-monitors chose the person best suited to each specific activity, even if that meant a different companion for different outings.
Commitment: high self-monitors reported more willingness to change dating partners, had more different dating partners, shorter current relationships, and more sexual partners. Low self-monitor females were least likely to report a one-night stand.
Persuasion: high self-monitors were more persuaded by prestige than product quality. They were better at noticing status cues and positioning themselves as go-to people in the workplace.
Self-monitoring and priming
Low self-monitors assimilate primed concepts into the self more readily. Priming "lucky" or "unlucky" numbers changed how lucky low self-monitors felt as a person. Priming "professor" led low self-monitors to process persuasive messages by attending to argument strength (acting intelligently), while highs were unaffected.
Dissonance and self-monitoring
Cognitive dissonance effects are stronger and more persistent in low self-monitors. Because lows care about consistency between attitudes and behaviour, freely choosing to act against their beliefs creates more discomfort. Highs can more easily entertain contradiction.
Students often think Mischel argued there is no such thing as personality. He did not. He argued that consistency lies in situation-specific if-then patterns, not in cross-situational trait averages.
Implementation intentions are not the same as simply "being motivated." Two people equally committed to a goal will differ in follow-through if only one has formed a specific when-where-how plan.
The ironic process is not that suppression fails immediately. Suppression works in the moment. The problem is the rebound: once you stop suppressing, the thought comes back stronger than if you had never suppressed at all.
Self-monitoring is not about being fake (high) vs. authentic (low). High self-monitors adapt; low self-monitors stay consistent. Both have advantages and costs.
⚠️ Be able to explain self-affirmation theory and describe one study showing it reduces dissonance and one showing it reduces prejudice.
⚠️ Know Mischel's .16 correlation, what it means, and how CAPS resolves it through if-then contingencies. The summer camp study is a key example.
⚠️ Understand the distinction between promotion and prevention focus, including how they differ on expectancy-value commitment. The ER doctor example is a good way to illustrate prevention focus.
⚠️ Be prepared to explain the white bear rebound effect, the three mental processes (state selection, operating, monitoring), and what happens under cognitive load.
⚠️ Know the key differences between high and low self-monitors in attitude-behaviour consistency, dating behaviour, and response to priming.
True or False: Mischel's .16 correlation means that personality does not exist.
False. It means cross-situational prediction from a single observation is weak, but within-situation consistency (if-then contingencies) can be quite strong.
Fill in the blank: In Wegner's theory, the ______ process searches for unwanted thoughts, while the ______ process tries to replace them.
Monitoring; operating.
True or False: Self-affirmation only works if you affirm a value related to the specific threat.
False. The affirmation must be about a value important to you, but it can be in an entirely different domain from the threat.
Fill in the blank: Higgins showed that achieving promotion-focus goals leads to ______, while failing leads to ______.
Happiness; dejection (or disappointment).
True or False: High self-monitors show stronger cognitive dissonance effects than low self-monitors.
False. Low self-monitors show stronger and more persistent dissonance effects.
Q: Explain how Mischel's CAPS model resolves the "personality consistency" problem using the summer camp data.
A: Mischel found that cross-situational consistency was low (.16), meaning knowing a child was aggressive in one situation did not predict aggression in a completely different situation. However, within-situation consistency was much higher (.4): if peer teasing elicited verbal aggression in the first half of observations, it reliably did so in the second half. CAPS explains this by arguing that personality lies not in acting the same way everywhere but in having stable if-then patterns: "if peer teasing, then verbal aggression" is a reliable personality signature for some children.
Q: How does the rebound effect work in Wegner's white bear paradigm, and how does a focused distractor eliminate it?
A: During suppression, people associate everything in their environment with "not thinking about the white bear," creating negative cues. When suppression ends, all those cues now trigger the white bear thought, producing a rebound (more thoughts than if they had never suppressed). A focused distractor ("think about a red VW") provides positive associations for environmental cues, so when suppression ends, the cues point to the VW rather than the bear.
Q: How did Snyder demonstrate that self-monitoring moderates the attitude-behaviour relationship?
A: In the Harrison vs. University of Maine study, Snyder measured attitudes toward affirmative action and then had participants judge a court case. For low self-monitors, attitudes strongly predicted judgements. For high self-monitors, the correlation was essentially zero. Additionally, making attitudes accessible (through reflection) helped lows but not highs, while making the attitude situationally relevant (precedent-setting case) brought highs in line with lows.
Q: What is the difference between self-affirmation (Steele) and symbolic self-completion (Gollwitzer)?
A: Self-affirmation addresses threats to global self-integrity: any valued domain can be affirmed to restore the general sense of being a good, competent person. Symbolic self-completion addresses threats to specific self-definitions tied to goals: when a goal-relevant identity is threatened, people compensate specifically within that identity domain (e.g. a career woman who gets negative feedback works harder to demonstrate career competence, not competence in general). Self-affirmation's limit: if the threat is to something critically important, affirming an unrelated domain may not be sufficient.
Self-affirmation connects to biased assimilation and prejudice (earlier lectures). Mischel's CAPS model connects to rejection sensitivity (Downey), which predicts relationship outcomes (covered in the relationships lectures). Promotion vs. prevention focus connects to self-regulation and temptation (Fishbach), and to goal pursuit in the agency/communion framework (Helgeson). Ironic processes connect to the study of secrets in relationships (Wegner) and to the difficulty of suppressing stereotype activation (Devine, covered in the prejudice lectures). Self-monitoring connects to the priming and assimilation/contrast literature (Wheeler's active self account).
Tags: self-presentation, self-verification, Swann, spotlight effect, self-affirmation, Steele, cognitive dissonance, induced compliance, free choice paradigm, symbolic self-completion, Gollwitzer, CAPS, Mischel, personality signature, if-then contingency, rejection sensitivity, Downey, culture of honour, goals, expectancy-value, promotion focus, prevention focus, Higgins, implementation intentions, deliberative mindset, implemental mindset, social norms, descriptive norms, injunctive norms, Cialdini, pluralistic ignorance, Asch, conformity, ironic process, Wegner, white bear, rebound effect, mental control, self-monitoring, Snyder, attitude-behaviour consistency, PSY 320, personality and social psychology