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Two laboratory studies identified conditions under which individuals are willing to misrepresent information regarding another person's performance to protect that other person's public self-image (i.e., to provide deceptive strategic identity support). The extent to which deceptive strategic identity support arises is determined by the salience of another person's need for impression-management assistance. Factors increasing the salience of a person in need (including performance discrepancy, relationship closeness, location of the target, and trait empathy) motivated individuals' willingness to engage in deceptive strategic identity support. State empathy was found to mediate the effects.
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Argo et al. (2011) studied this question.
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