At the time that I started graduate school, I was interested in many areas of social psychology, particularly those that involve people’s behavior in face-to-face interactions, but I hadn’t settled on a specific area of research. Soon after I arrived at graduate school, Dr Barry Schlenker invited me to join his research group, which focused primarily on self-presentation, and I became very intrigued by the topic.

Whatever else people may be doing, they generally keep an eye on how they are being perceived and evaluated by other people, and their concerns with others’ impressions (particularly their desire to avoid making a bad impression) often influence their behavior and emotions. In addition to the topic of self-presentation, this interest led me to take a deep dive throughout my career into other topics related to self and identity such as self-awareness, self-evaluation, social anxiety, egoicism, self-compassion, and humility.

The term “self” has been a problem in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and everyday usage because “self” has been used in so many different ways. Philosophers have defined “self” in at least eight different ways, and behavioral and social scientists have used it in at least five different ways. In fact, I have seen cases in which researchers have used “self” in multiple ways in a single book or article.

Several years ago, I made the case that psychologists should stop using the word “self” entirely and adopt more precise words instead. The hyphenated self-terms are usually reasonably clear; for example, we mostly agree on what “self-concept,” “self-enhancement,” “self-deception,” and “self-presentation” mean. However, the word “self” itself has serious conceptual problems.

The only way in which I use the word “self” is to refer to the cognitive processes that allow human beings to think consciously about themselves. Of course, other animals can “think” in the sense that they process information about themselves and the world, but only a few species have the ability to think consciously about themselves. This ability is most highly developed in human beings, allowing us to plan, develop a self-concept, evaluate ourselves, talk to ourselves in our own minds, think about what other people are thinking about us, and consciously control our own behaviors. To me, the “self” is the psychological system that underlies conscious self-relevant thought.

“Ego” is perhaps an even messier concept than “self.” The word “ego” was borrowed from the Latin word for “I” and was first used in the 18th century to refer to the conscious, thinking, and feeling part of a human being. However, over time, “ego” began to be used in other ways as well to refer to: the conscious part of the mind that is the source of will and self-control; an inflated sense of one’s own importance or exaggerated self-esteem (as in “he has a big ego”); a person’s self-image or self-esteem (as in “she was trying to protect her ego”); and, most broadly, the entire self. As with the word “self,” the uses of “ego” are so varied as to render the term useless for clear communication. There are clearer, more precise terms for all of these things.

Many people’s goals in life are facilitated by making particular desired impressions on other people and avoiding making undesired impressions. People engage in self-presentation when they believe that conveying certain images of themselves will help them achieve some desired goal. Although the notion that people manage the impressions that others form of them may sound shady or deceptive, in many cases, people engage in self-presentation to convey accurate impressions of themselves. Other people often can’t perceive certain information about our personalities, abilities, backgrounds, attitudes, values, and other characteristics unless we deliberately manage our impressions to convey relevant information to them. Of course, we also foster impressions of ourselves that are exaggerated or downright false, but in all cases, we do so when we believe that making certain impressions will lead other people to treat us in desired ways, helping us obtain certain rewards or achieve certain goals.

Self-presentation differs across situations in two ways. First, people’s motivation to impression-manage varies across situations depending on the degree to which they think that making particular impressions will help them achieve their goals. In some instances, people aren’t motivated to manage their impressions because others’ impressions of them don’t matter very much. However, in other situations, people are motivated – and sometimes very motivated – to foster impressions of themselves that will lead other people to treat them in desired ways. So people’s motivation to manage their impressions varies across different situations.

The second way in which self-presentation varies across situations involves the particular impressions that people want to convey. In different situations, people may want to convey different impressions. The range of impressions people want to convey to achieve their goals is gigantic. Many impressions are positive, as when we want to be seen as intelligent, attractive, fun-loving, ethical, confident, successful, kind, humorous, motivated, or skilled in some area. But sometimes, we want to convey less positive impressions, as when we want others to see us as helpless, aggressive, in need of support, uninformed, impatient, or about to “lose it.” People choose to foster the impressions that they think will serve their interests in a particular situation, whether those impressions are good or bad.

Variability in self-presentation is essential in helping us to behave appropriately in whatever situation we find ourselves in. People who always convey exactly the same impressions to everyone in every situation – their boss, co-workers, neighbors, romantic partners, family members, children, and so on – come across in very inappropriate ways in many social settings. We change our public persona quickly and easily many times a day as the situation and audience change.

But, of course, people who change their public personas too often or too much will be perceived as human chameleons, make a bad impression (of being manipulative or unstable, for example), and receive negative reactions from other people. So, although we must change how we present ourselves to different people and in different situations, our self-presentations must not vary wildly.

No matter what people are doing, they regularly monitor other people’s reactions to them on a nonconsious basis. We can be fully immersed in a social interaction – not thinking at all about what others might be thinking about us – when we nonconsciously detect a glance, facial expression, tone of voice, body movement, or other cue that alerts us to the possibility that we are not making the impression we desire. It’s as if we have antennae that are scanning our social environment for clues about what others might be thinking about us.

Of course, in many instances we think consciously about what people might be thinking about us. And, in many cases, we think in advance about how others might perceive and evaluate us in an upcoming interaction so that we can plan how to comport ourselves.

Our challenge is that, unless people explicitly tell us what they think (which is rare), we must try to infer the impressions they are forming of us from unclear and incomplete information. And, because other people rarely tell us exactly what they think of us, we sometimes get it wrong, thinking that their impressions of us are either better or worse than they actually are.

Many other species engage in rudimentary forms of automatic “self-presentation” in which they change their appearance or behavior to influence the behavior of other animals. A dog may bare its teeth at an intruder, which conveys an impression of aggressiveness; a low-status ape may hang its head to convey submissiveness; and a male peacock may spread its tail to be attractive to females. Of course, other animals do not think consciously about what they are doing, but the fact that other species engage in behaviors designed to influence others’ impressions of them suggests that the basics of self-presentation are hard-wired.

However, the evolution of human self-awareness changed self-presentation dramatically by allowing our prehuman ancestors to think consciously about how others viewed them and to take intentional steps to influence others’ impressions. Furthermore, the emergence of language and the ability to symbolize were important because a good deal of human self-presentation involves speech and actions that convey information symbolically, such as wearing bodily ornaments or decorating one’s house in a particular way.

For the first 15 years of my career, I avoided the topic of self-esteem like it was the plague. Although people’s self-evaluations were related to many of my interests, including self-presentation, I had difficulty accepting widely accepted ideas about self-esteem. For example, most psychologists assumed that people have a basic, built-in need for self-esteem, are motivated to behave in ways that help them feel good about themselves, and have psychological problems if their self-esteem is low. But no one had adequately explained what self-esteem actually does that makes it so important to human functioning.

Remember, we’re not talking about “self-confidence” – believing in one’s ability to do things -- which is obviously useful, but rather about merely feeling good about oneself. Yes, we’d rather feel good than bad, but having indiscriminately positive feelings about ourselves would seem to lead to bad outcomes; we do better when our beliefs about ourselves are accurate. So what does self-esteem actually do?

Then, I was researching the effects of social rejection in the early 1990s and kept finding that being rejected reliably lowered people’s self-esteem. The fact that people’s self-esteem changed proportionally to how accepted versus rejected they felt made it look like self-esteem was an internal meter or gauge of social acceptance and rejection. Viewing self-esteem as a “sociometer” (my word for the self-esteem meter) helped explain what self-esteem does – it helps us monitor our acceptance and rejection by other people. It’s much like the fuel gauge in a car, but instead of indicating how much gas is in the tank, it tells us how much other people value having connections with us.

Thinking of self-esteem as a meter or gauge helps to make sense out of a great deal of research on self-esteem. For example, people aren’t motivated to pursue self-esteem for its own sake; rather, they are motivated to behave in ways that raise their self-esteem because those behaviors increase their likelihood of social acceptance. Just as you don’t fill your gas tank just to make the fuel gauge move from Empty toward Full, you don’t do good things just to raise your self-esteem but rather to increase how much other people value you.

Furthermore, sociometer theory explains the things that raise self-esteem—for example, being competent, successful, ethical, attractive, and a good group member. These are the things that increase our relational value to other people and lead them to want to have connections with us. And it explains why people with lower self-esteem respond more strongly to rejection than people with higher self-esteem – their social gas tanks are emptier.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” – Eleanor Roosevelt

To an extent, this is true. Other people make us feel bad about ourselves only to the extent that we allow their evaluations to affect us. However, we sometimes feel inferior because we actually are, and that seems perfectly appropriate. We are all inferior to certain other people on virtually every dimension; absolutely no one is superior to everyone else across the board. So, the issue is not recognizing that you are, in fact, inferior to other people on particular dimensions; that’s an objective fact. The issue is whether you allow yourself to be troubled by this inevitable, universal truth. The issue is learning to accept the fact that we are often not as good at things as other people are.

“Care about what other people think about you and you will always be their prisoner” – Lao Tzu

I‘m a big fan of Lao Tzu, but I disagree with him about this. People absolutely must care about what other people think about them in order to get by in life. Think about what the world would be like if nobody cared what anybody else thought; think about how people would look, how they’d smell, how they’d act if they didn’t care whether other people thought they were unkempt, stinky, nasty, selfish, and stupid. Our concerns with others’ opinions of us motivate a great deal of civil, helpful, ethical, productive, and other positive behaviors.

Of course, people can be too concerned about what others think of them, and they sometimes behave in ways that hurt themselves or other people in order to affect others’ impressions of them. So, if Lao Tzu would have said “Care too much what people think about you will always be their prisoner,” I would agree.

“The minute you start caring about what other people think is the minute you stop being yourself” – Meryl Streep

We all know what Meryl means, but again, the reality is more nuanced than her blanket statement. First, if you are the kind of person who cares what other people think, then you are, in fact, being yourself when you care what others think. Granted, you may respond in ways that you’d really rather not respond, but you are being yourself when you do so. In addition, we are concerned with what other people think because their impressions of us affect whether we achieve our personal, social, and occupational goals in life. So, being concerned is often in the service of being who we want to be and having the life we want to live. And, we don’t have to behave in fake, deceptive ways to achieve those things.

I am certain that, during her career, Meryl cared a great deal about what directors and producers thought of her in dozens of auditions for acting roles and also cared about what audiences thought of her performances. But I don’t think that caring about how others perceived her meant that she stopped being herself.

To answer the second question first, yes, people can develop identities that are independent of social evaluation, but we wouldn’t want them to. In fact, we want people to seek identities that are socially valued, and the people who are least concerned about social evaluation tend to be indifferent to how their behavior affects other people, if not sociopathic. So, as I’ve said already, we want people to be appropriately concerned with what other people think of them.

But, as the first question suggests, many people are too concerned with what other people think, worrying far too much about making desired impressions to obtain approval. The solution is two-fold. First, when people realize they are worrying about what other people think of them, they need to ask themselves whether the opinions of those particular people matter. Often, we’re concerned about social evaluations even when they have little or no implications for our goals or well-being. Many people are often nonconsciously attuned to social evaluation when it doesn’t really matter, and recognizing this is the first step toward becoming less concerned.

Second, even when others’ impressions and approval seem to matter, people often go overboard in their efforts to make desired impressions, saying and doing things that are unethical and/or harmful to themselves or others. A good deal of maladaptive and harmful behavior is motivated by a desire to make certain impressions on others. (To give just one example, our research shows that teenagers sometimes drive too fast, drink, and take drugs even when they don’t want to just to gain approval from their peers.) So, when we realize that we want to be viewed in a certain way, we must still behave in ways that are not harmful to ourselves or others. That requires self-insight and self-control – much like refraining from eating too much of a tasty but unhealthy treat – but it’s an essential part of balancing the natural desire for approval and acceptance with the desire to be a good person.

Much of my work on self-presentation and self-processes more generally is included in two books: Self-presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior and The Curse of The Self: Self-awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life. I also have a six-episode course with the Teaching Company (now Wondrium) titled Your Public Persona: Self-presentation in Everyday Life, as well as a blog on PsychologyToday.com on Toward a Less Egoic World.

More information is available at the following links:

https://www.amazon.com/Self-presentation-Impression-Management-Interpersonal-Behaviour/dp/0813330041 
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0195325443?ref_=mr_referred_us_au_au
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/your-public-persona-self-presentation-in-everyday-life#:~:text=Discover%20both%20how%20we%20form,manage%20their%20impressions%20of%20us.&text=Professor%20Leary%20takes%20viewers%20into,and%20explicit%20statements%20about%20ourselves
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/toward-less-egoic-world