title: Self-presentational persona: simultaneous management of multiple impressions.
abstract: Most research on self-presentation has examined how people convey images of themselves on only 1 or 2 dimensions at a time. In everyday interactions, however, people often manage their impressions on several image-relevant dimensions simultaneously. By examining people's self-presentations to several targets across multiple dimensions, these 2 studies offer new insights into the nature of self-presentation and provide a novel paradigm for studying impression management. Results showed that most people rely on a relatively small number of basic self-presentational personas in which they convey particular profiles of impressions as a set and that these personas reflect both normative influences to project images that are appropriate to a particular target and distinctive influences by which people put an idiosyncratic spin on these normative images. Furthermore, although people's self-presentational profiles correlate moderately with their self-views, they tailor their public images to specific targets. The degree to which participants' self-presentations were normative and distinctive, as well as the extent to which they reflected their own self-views, were moderated by individual differences in agreeableness, self-esteem, authenticity, and Machiavellianism.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA. leary@duke.edu
authors.forename: Mark R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Leary
authors.forename: Ashley Batts
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Allen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D010551:Personality / Q000502:physiology*; D012649:Self Concept; D012647:Self-Assessment; D012938:Social Perception; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult