What is Self-presentation theory?
Erving Goffman’s self-presentation theory focuses on an individual’s desire and need to control the impression others have of them. This impression can be based on any aspect of an individual’s life, from reality to fiction, from physical to emotional, from social to mental.
This theory can be split into two categories of self-presentation. The first is audience-pleasing self-presentation, and the second is self-construction self-presentation.
Audience-pleasing self-presentation
In its simplest form, audience-pleasing self-presentation is where an individual will change aspects of themselves, such as their interests, abilities and/or skills, so that those around them will think more positively of them and will accept them into the social group, be that a friendship group, class or workplace.
When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about them or to bring into play information they already possess. This allows them to assert some degree of control over the environment and situation by changing aspects of themselves in order to acclimatise. Beyond the individual influences that those present changes foster, the environment often has a significant impact on the changes a person may make.
With this in mind, audience-pleasing self-presentation is not fixed and will vary depending on the environment and people present. For example, a person would present themselves differently at a family dinner in a nice restaurant than when attending a party with friends. Audience-pleasing motives can even produce inconsistent or contradictory self-presentations across audiences. For example, a person might present differently at the same party depending on which social groups are present. This is often because the performance focuses on only one aspect of the performer.
Additionally, motivations for audience-pleasing self-presentation vary in strength based on the audience’s power and importance, particularly how much the self-presenter depends on the audience’s acceptance. Also, this is not always a conscious effort and can sometimes be an ingrained response that mimics and conforms to their environment or the people around them.
Self-construction self-presentation
Unlike audience-pleasing self-presentation, self-construction self-presentation focuses on portraying consistent characteristics across environments and audiences and involves little modification based on these. The key function of self-construction is the individual’s desire to claim a certain trait and uncertainty about whether one has it.
An interesting aspect of self-construction is that it is centred toward the audience, not toward making a favourable impression on them. It is just to be seen as having specific characteristics.
