Effects of Status and Knowledgeability of Audience on Self Presentation

This study tested the hypothesis that people would enhance their statement of performance expectancies before a higher status audience with power over their performance outcomes while becoming more modest before an audience of peers, and that this pattern would be most evident when the audience was believed to be relatively uninformed about the person's history of competence. Students stated their grade expectancies for a course to one of three audiences: the teacher, fellow students, or an uninvolved graduate student researcher. In each audience condition, some subjects were told that the audience had access to their grade-point averages, while others were left to assume that their answers were the only information the audience would have. Students displayed greater self enhancement to the teacher than to fellow students, regardless of the information level of these audiences. Information level determined presentations to the researcher, with the informed researcher treated like the teacher (receiving enhanced self presentations) and the uninformed researcher treated like the students (receiving modest self presentations). A person may find it useful to voice certain public expectancies simply because they have desirable effects on his audience (Goffman, 1959). If a person indicates publicly that he expects to do well, the message may serve to influence an audience to adopt a more favorable set towards him. Subjects have been found to describe themselves as more competent at a task when addressing someone with power over them as opposed to someone without such power (Stires and Jones,