Managing Impressions: Self-Monitoring, Ingratiation, and Self-Handicapping

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Managing Impressions: Self-Monitoring, Ingratiation, and Self-Handicapping

Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 4: The Self and IdentitySection 4.5 · lesson 22 of 8511 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Three heavily researched tactics, and what each one costs over time.

  • Contrast high and low self-monitors across attitudes, friendship, and work
  • List Jones's ingratiation tactics and state the ingratiator's dilemma
  • Build the attributional logic of self-handicapping
  • Explain BIRGing and CORFing as identity management

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Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,502 words). Read along, or search it.

The Self and Identity

Managing Impressions

Section four point four gave us the strategies of self-presentation. This section takes three of them apart at the level of tactics. Self-monitoring, which is a disposition rather than a move. Ingratiation, which contains an elegant self-defeating trap. And self-handicapping, where people damage their own performance deliberately. A fourth tactic closes the section, and it operates at the level of groups. Basking in reflected glory, and its mirror image. The throughline is cost. Each of these works, and each of them charges for it. By the end you should be able to distinguish tactical use from habitual reliance.

Strategy To Tactic

How the Strategies Get Enacted

Start by separating strategy from tactic, because the words get used loosely. A strategy is the impression you are aiming for. A tactic is the specific behavior by which you pursue it. Self-monitoring is the odd one in this list. It is the dispositional regulation of expressive behavior. Not a move somebody makes, but a standing tendency they carry. Ingratiation is cultivating liking in a specific target. Self-handicapping is protecting the self from diagnostic failure, in advance. And the group-level pair manages your apparent affiliation with a team. According to how well that team happens to be doing.

Snyder, 1974

Self-Monitoring as a Disposition

Mark Snyder introduced self-monitoring in nineteen seventy-four. He developed it further across the following decade, into nineteen eighty-seven. It is the disposition to observe and regulate your own expressive behavior. And to do so in response to social and situational cues. Snyder built a scale for it, originally twenty-five items, later eighteen. High self-monitors are pragmatic chameleons. They modify their behavior to fit each situation they enter. Low self-monitors act from stable internal dispositions instead. The same person, more or less, across quite different rooms. The scale's factor structure has been debated, and that debate is not settled. But the high-low distinction has proved remarkably robust as a moderator. One caution before the details. Neither pole is the healthy one. This is a difference in strategy, not in virtue.

The Two Profiles

Same Question, Two Different Answers

The two profiles produce distinctive patterns, and they are worth learning as a set. Start with friendship, where the difference is unusually visible. High self-monitors partition their friends by activity. A tennis friend, a study friend, a movie friend. Each relationship is organized around a shared domain. Low self-monitors choose friends whose values match their own across contexts. Fewer friends, doing more different things together. Attitudes show the same split. High self-monitors form attitudes that track audience preferences. Low self-monitors anchor their attitudes in personal values instead. At work, high self-monitors more readily occupy boundary-spanning roles. They also tend to receive faster promotion, which sounds like a clean win. But there is a catch, and it is a subtle one. Their performance evaluations are sometimes discounted once the adaptiveness is recognized. The skill stops working at the moment it becomes visible.

Jones, 1964

Four Ways to Cultivate Liking

Edward Jones published Ingratiation in nineteen sixty-four. It remains the foundational text on cultivating liking as a social tactic. Jones identified four principal tactics, each with a characteristic risk. The first is other-enhancement. Compliments, praise, and expressions of admiration. The risk is being detected as flattery, and read as insincere. The second is opinion conformity. Agreement with the target's views and preferences. The risk here is different. Inconsistency gets exposed across audiences. Agree with everyone and eventually two of them compare notes. The third tactic is self-presentation, aimed at this particular target. Strategic projection of the traits that target admires. The risk is overclaim, and being discredited if the expertise is ever tested. The fourth is rendering favors. Unsolicited assistance, gifts, or services. The risk is being perceived as transactional, or manipulative.

The Trap

The Ingratiator's Dilemma

Jones's analysis produced one genuinely elegant result. He called it the ingratiator's dilemma, and it is self-defeating by construction. Here it is. The more transparently a person needs to be liked by the target. That is, the greater the target's power over the ingratiator. The more suspicion any ingratiating behavior invites. Which is precisely when ingratiation matters most to the person doing it. The tactic is least usable exactly where it would pay best. One consequence follows directly. Skillful ingratiation requires concealing the strategic motive. Not performing the tactic harder, which only raises suspicion further. In practice that means indirection. Third-party compliments, which reach the target without being addressed to them. Deflected agreement, and careful selection of context. Subordinates' upward influence in organizations has been the productive test setting.

Berglas And Jones, 1978

Self-Handicapping: Building an Excuse First

The third tactic is the strangest one, and it looks irrational at first. Berglas and Jones named self-handicapping in nineteen seventy-eight. It covers behaviors undertaken in advance of a performance. Behaviors that provide a ready-made excuse for potential failure. Their classic experiment is worth knowing in detail. Participants first succeeded on a problem-solving task. But the conditions left them uncertain whether that success was genuine. Then, before a second task, they were offered a choice of drug. One would impair performance. The other would enhance it. The uncertain participants were more likely to choose the impairing drug. They sabotaged themselves, deliberately, before the test began. Read the setup again, because the trigger is the interesting part. It was not failure that produced this. It was success the person could not explain, and therefore could not count on repeating.

The Logic

Why Sabotage Is Rational Here

So why is deliberate sabotage rational here? The logic is attributional, and Kelley's nineteen seventy-three principles explain it. Discounting says a cause is discounted when other plausible causes are present. Augmentation says a cause is enhanced when it produces an effect despite countervailing forces. Now apply both to a handicap you installed yourself. If you fail, the handicap is available as the explanation. Your ability gets discounted as a cause. The failure says nothing about you. If you succeed, you succeeded despite the obstacle. Your ability gets augmented. The success says more about you than it otherwise would. The handicap protects the self-image whichever way the performance goes. That is genuinely clever, and it is also why the tactic is so sticky. But there is a price, and it is charged in the real world. The protection comes at the cost of objective performance. And over time, of self-regulation and elevated negative affect.

Tice And Baumeister

Behavioral Versus Claimed Handicaps

Tice and Baumeister split the construct in nineteen ninety. The split matters practically, because the two forms cost different amounts. Behavioral self-handicapping means arranging real obstacles. Procrastinating. Withholding effort. Choosing impeding conditions. These damage actual performance, which is the whole point and the whole problem. Claimed self-handicapping is verbal instead. Reporting illness, stress, or anxiety before a test. The conditions of performance are unchanged. So claimed handicapping preserves performance while still building the attributional buffer. Which makes it the cheaper option, when the setting allows it. Three things moderate who does this at all. Gender, self-esteem instability, and contingency on the domain in question. That last one connects straight back to Crocker and Wolfe in section four point three.

Cialdini, 1976

BIRGing and CORFing

The final tactic is not about your own behavior at all. Cialdini and colleagues documented it in nineteen seventy-six. They called it basking in reflected glory. University students were more likely to wear team apparel after victories than after defeats. They were also more likely to use the pronoun we when describing the team. We won. They lost. The pronoun does the identity work. The complementary tactic is cutting off reflected failure. Distancing yourself from a group whose performance has become a liability. Notice what makes this pair remarkable. Neither one requires the person to have done anything at all. The affiliation itself is the resource being managed. So impression management extends beyond individual behavior. It includes strategic management of group affiliations. And that anticipates much of the later social-identity work on the collective self.

The Costs

What Each Tactic Charges Over Time

Now the accounting, because all three major tactics carry long-term costs. These are not free moves that happen to be effective. Chronic high self-monitoring is associated with thinner relationships. And with lower partner-reported intimacy, which is the more damning measure. The partner notices something the self-report does not. Chronic ingratiation erodes credibility over time. Which is exactly the resource the tactic was meant to build. Chronic self-handicapping suppresses performance and corrodes well-being. So the second caution is about frequency, not about the tactics themselves. The line between tactic and habit is consequential. Tactical use, deployed selectively, can be genuinely adaptive. Habitual reliance reorganizes the self around external evaluation.

Consolidate

Accelerators and Brakes, Not Chess Moves

Here is how to hold all of this together. Do not treat these as discrete moves on a social chessboard. Treat them as accelerators or brakes on identity construction. That is the larger project this whole chapter is describing. Five terms to fix before you move on. Self-monitoring, the disposition to regulate expressive behavior from social cues. Ingratiation, with its four tactics and its built-in dilemma. Self-handicapping, where an obstacle is installed to control the attribution afterward. The behavioral and claimed forms of it, which differ in what they cost. And BIRGing and CORFing, which manage affiliation rather than behavior. One question to carry forward into any of these. Is this person deploying a tactic, or has the tactic started deploying them?

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Managing Impressions: Self-Monitoring, Ingratiation, and Self-Handicapping

What is self-monitoring in psychology?
Self-monitoring is the tendency to observe and adjust one's expressive behavior to fit social and situational cues, a concept introduced by Mark Snyder in 1974. High self-monitors act like social chameleons, changing their behavior to suit each setting, while low self-monitors act more consistently from their own values and dispositions. Neither pole is healthier; they reflect different strategies, and each has typical costs and benefits.
What is the ingratiator's dilemma?
The ingratiator's dilemma is that ingratiation looks most suspicious exactly when it matters most. Edward Jones described it in his 1964 book Ingratiation: the more power a target holds over someone, the more that person needs to be liked, and the more likely the target is to see flattery, agreement, or favors as strategic. Effective ingratiation therefore depends on concealing the motive, for example through compliments passed along by third parties.
What is self-handicapping with an example?
Self-handicapping is creating or claiming an obstacle before a performance so that failure can be blamed on the obstacle instead of ability. In Steven Berglas and Edward Jones's 1978 study, participants unsure whether their earlier success was deserved more often chose a drug they believed would impair performance. Behavioral handicaps, such as procrastinating, actually hurt performance, while claimed handicaps, such as reporting stress before a test, offer an excuse without that cost.
What does BIRGing mean in psychology?
BIRGing, or basking in reflected glory, is publicly associating yourself with a successful group even though you did not contribute to its success. Robert Cialdini and colleagues found in 1976 that university students wore school apparel more often after their football team won and used first-person plural pronouns more when describing victories. The opposite tactic, cutting off reflected failure, or CORFing, means distancing yourself from a group that is losing.

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