Salient private audiences and awareness of the self.

University of Waterloo , Ontario CanadaWe used self-awareness and cognitive priming methodologies to test the hypothesis that importantaspects of the experience of self derive from the way one would be perceived and responded to by aprivate audience of internally represented significant others. In the first study, 40 undergraduatewomen visualized the faces of either two acquaintances from campus or two older members of theirown family. Later, when they rated the enjoyableness of a sexually permissive piece of fiction, theytended to respond in ways that would be acceptable to their salient private audience. There was someevidence that this effect was especially pronounced for subjects made self-aware by the presence of asmall mirror, whose responsivity to self-image concerns was presumably heightened. In the secondstudy, 60 undergraduate men were exposed to a failure experience, and their resulting self-evalua-tions were assessed. Self-aware subjects' responses reflected the evaluative style of a recently visual-ized private audience. Strong negative self-evaluative reactions on a number of measures were evi-dent when the salient audience tended to make acceptance contingent on successful performances,but not when the audience manifested relatively noncontingent acceptance. These results demon-strate the influence of internally represented significant relationships on the experience of self.A unique aspect of human cognition is the ability of peopleto be aware of themselves, develop theories about who they are,and evaluate those self-images. Many models have been pro-posed from diverse theoretical perspectives, identifying factorsthat shape the self-evaluation process and the related cycle ofbehavioral self-regulation. One idea that has formed the corner-stone of a number of approaches is that a person's experienceof self often takes the form of imagining how the self would beperceived and responded to by significant other people. Thisidea is most prevalent in the writings of the symbolic interac-tionists (e.g., Cooley's, 1902, looking-glass self; Mead's, 1934,generalized other), but it is also central to diverse other theories(cf. Sullivan's, 1940, reflected appraisals; Kohut's, 1984, selfob-jects; Higgins, Klein, reference-group theory, e.g., Kelley, 1952, Shibutani, 1955;impression management theory, e.g., Goffman, 1959, Schlen-This research was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Re-search Council of Canada doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships toMark W. Baldwin and was the basis for his doctoral dissertation at theUniversity of Waterloo. Some of the data reported in this article werepresented at the June 1984 meeting of the Canadian Psychological Asso-ciation, Ottawa, Ontario, and at the August 1984 meeting of the Ameri-can Psychological Association, Toronto, Ontario.We would like to thank Janet Hunt for serving as an experimenter inStudy 2. Michael Ross an d Mark Zanna for valuable conversations dur-ing the earlier phases of the research, and Aaron Brower, Nancy Cantor,John Ellard, Eric Lang, Mary Miller, Paula Niedenthal, Julie Norem,Carolin Showers, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful com-ments on drafts of the article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to MarkW. Baldwin, Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies Unit, Clarke Insti-tute of Psychiatry, 250 College Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T1R8.ker, 1980, 1985; object relations theory, e.g.. Eagle, 1984,Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, Guntrip, 1961, 1971).The common ground shared by these models is the proposi-tion that the self is ultimately a social construction, developedand maintained via inference from experiences with others. Asense of self is experienced in relation to some audience,whether it be of people who are present or only imagined, spe-cific or generalized, actual or fantasized. Some perspectives(e.g., impression management) focus discussion on the publicaspects of self observable to actual other people in the immedi-ate environment. Most other writers (including some impres-sion management theorists, e.g., Schlenker, 1985) also stress theimportant influence of internally represented audiences. Ourresearch is concerned primarily with the impact of such inter-nal referents. For the sake of convenience, we will refer to theserepresentations of others as a private audience.One major domain of self-construal, which is the focus of thiswork, concerns issues of evaluation. The particular standardsof comparison used in the self-evaluation process (e.g., ideals,values, norms), as well as the more general style of evaluation(e.g., a vulnerability to basing global inferences and emotionalreactions on single behavioral outcomes), may reflect theevaluative standards and styles associated with some privateaudience.The actual process whereby the experience of self is shapedthrough reference to a private audience may take a range offorms. Self-perceptio n an self-evaluatio may ofte involve adeliberate process of consciously imagining the reactions of sig-nificant others (e.g., Cooley, 1902). At other times, private-audi-ence dynamics may be quite unconscious: Self-relevant infor-mation may simply be processed and elaborated according toemotional and cognitive structures representing how such in-formation would be dealt with in those significant relationships(e.g., Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). As a general statement of1087