Meeting someone for the first time can give you rare insights into
his or her psychological makeup. Your first impression sets the stage
for how your relationship with this person is destined to evolve.
Perhaps you’ve made an appointment with a new dentist because you’re
dissatisfied with your previous dentist. After taking one quick look
inside your mouth, she immediately starts telling you all the procedures
you’re likely to need, how much they cost, and what your schedule of
appointments should look like. She lets you know that before you come
for your next visit, you need to brush and floss thoroughly so that
there are no food remnants between your teeth. You also need to buy
new, expensive home appliances, including an electronic toothbrush and
water flossing machine. Your head is spinning from the litany of
instructions, and you leave the office wondering if maybe you should do a
little more shopping for another dentist before you come back to see
her. She just seems too controlling and you’d like someone else who
doesn’t come on quite so demanding at the first meeting, even if she was
right in what she told you to do.
Impression management
researchers are interested in pinpointing the factors that influence people’s reactions to the personality,
communication style, and appearance of others. This research can
provide insight into why you felt the way you did with this dentist, but
also can help you understand how better to present yourself to others.
Coming on too strong in an initial interaction, from this perspective,
involves appearing too dominant, both in the demands you might place on
someone else, and in the ways that you overshadow the other person in
conversation. You might also, if you’ve come on too strong, reveal too
much about yourself. This dentist didn’t provide a great deal of
information about herself, but perhaps you’ve met others at a social
gathering who give you their entire life story in the first minute of
your time together in a 5-minute monologue full cringe-worthy moments.
This also makes you want to run away and find a more pleasing
conversation partner.
New research by University of Texas at Arlington’s Wayne Crawford and
colleagues (2018) applied the “self-verification theory” to better
understand the discrepancies between the way people actually present
themselves and the way others perceive them. Returning to the example of
people who reveal too much about themselves the instant they meet you,
self-verification theory would suggest that they think they’re being
friendly and sociable, and not at all as annoying as you perceive them
to be. Self-verification theory proposes that people desire others to
view them the way they view themselves. According to this theory, “since
self-concepts, or self-views, are so vital to understanding
one’s self and reality, people are invested in protecting their
self-views.” The theory also proposes that you’ll feel happier when your
own view of yourself meshes with the way others see you. People do tend
to have positive biases in evaluating themselves (unless they are
depressed), so the theory would propose that you want others to see you
in as positive a light as you see yourself.
The person who comes on too strong, then, thinks that this approach
when meeting new people is appropriate. The dentist believes that she’s
providing vital information that you need to have right away, instead of
waiting to get to know you better, because she sees herself as a
competent professional who knows what she’s doing. The result, in terms
of impression management, is incongruence between the way the actor (in
this case the dentist) and the audience (you) interpret the behavior.
Self-verification theory proposes that when this incongruence exists,
the actor will experience negative outcomes.
Thus, the problem for people who come on too strong is that they
think they’re doing the right thing, and when they find out they’re not
(i.e. you don’t schedule a new appointment with this dentist), this
incongruence will chip away at their own favorable self-image.
Of course, some people might like having all of this information
presented to them at their first visit, in which case there will be no
incongruence. In this case, the dentist and this other patient will be
aligned in their interpretation of the dentist’s behavior.
Using data derived from the employees of a state agency, the authors
investigated the responses of 175 employees (61% female, average age of
43) to complete questionnaires assessing their own impression management
tactics relevant to the workplace
as well as their job satisfaction. Their supervisors (60% female,
average age of 47) provided ratings on parallel scales regarding their
subordinates, including a measure of how much they liked the employees.
As predicted, Crawford et al. observed that there were negative
outcomes for subordinates when their own ratings of impression
management tactics deviated from those of their supervisors. For
example, when the supervisors regarded their employees as engaging in
boasting (self-promotion) to a greater degree than the employees saw
themselves as boastful, employees were less satisfied with their jobs
and even were less compliant with the agency’s practices.
From a theoretical point of view, the UT Arlington study was
important because it showed that in impression management, you need to
examine both the actor and the audience, not just the self-ratings of
the actor (as is true in most impression management research). In
returning to the original problem of people who come off too strong, the
findings suggest that not everyone comes across as too strong to
everyone else. As the expression goes, “is it you, or is it me?” the
answer is that it’s the interaction of the two. That person at the party
who is too revealing in the first few moments of your conversation may
annoy you but be seen as engaging and scintillating by someone else.
To avoid being the one who comes across too strong yourself, the
Crawford et al. study also suggests that you learn to read your
audience. Don’t just automatically act the same way with everyone you
meet. Crawford and his colleagues noted that in some
subordinate-supervisor pairs, the longer pairs had worked together, the
less incongruence existed between them. Your over-enthusiastic behavior
of oversharing or trying to get people to do what you think is right
could work with your partner or best friend but would be seen as
offputting by a person who’s never met you before.
To sum up, people’s sense of self is strongly
affected by the way others regard them, as the UT Arlington researchers
suggest. Maintaining your own feelings of fulfillment can therefore
depend considerably on ensuring you’ve managed to create the impression
you desire.
AUTHOR
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.
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