Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 176

As you know, people strive to ensure that others have favorable opinions of them. One domain of life in which positive impressions are particularly important is work—otherwise we wouldn’t be able to obtain, keep, or advance in our jobs. Social psychologists and others have extensively investigated how people attempt to manage the impressions they make during interviews as well as on the job (Barrick, Shaffer, & DeGrassi, 2009; Bourdage et al., 2015; Cialdini, Petrova, & Goldstein, 2004; Ingold, Kleinmann, König, & Melchers, 2015; Jones & Pittman, 1982). There are many strategies people may use to manage impressions, including providing answers that are more socially desirable than their true answers (e.g., stating that they like working in teams even if they don’t because they think the interviewer wants to hear this) or claiming skills and/or experiences that they do not have (Levashina & Campion, 2007; Roulin, Bangerter, & Levashina, 2015; Tsai, Huang, Wu, & Lo, 2010; Weiss & Feldman, 2006).

For instance, using three measures of faking, O’Connell, Kung, and Tristan (2011) found that job applicants were more deceptive than existing employees and that they also gave significantly more positive self-reports than did employees (see this chapter’s Doing Research text box). Levashina and Campion (2007) developed an Interview Faking Behavior Scale that could accurately reveal when individuals were faking answers during interviews. They learned that more deception occurs when people are asked about hypothetical situations (e.g., “Suppose you have a great idea, but there is opposition to it among your colleagues. What would you do to persuade your colleagues to ‘see things your way’?”) than past behavior (e.g., “Describe a time when you had a great idea, but there was opposition to it. How did you do persuade your colleagues to ‘see things your way’?”). Moreover, participants tended to fake their answers more when the interviewers did not engage in follow-up questioning after receiving the initial answers.

People of course differ in the extent to which they actively manage impressions. For example, it won’t surprise you that individuals who are relatively high on an honesty-humility personality dimension are less likely to engage in impression management (Bourdage et al., 2015). Extraverts have a greater tendency to self-promote and attempt to ingratiate themselves than do introverts, and more agreeable individuals also engage in ingratiation. Other research has shown that people who are actively managing impressions are also more prone to misrepresenting themselves on personality scales (Ingold et al., 2015). Guadagno and Cialdini (2007) conducted a qualitative review of the literature and concluded that men and women seem to manage their self-presentations generally in line with traditional gender roles. Hogue, Levashina, and Hang (2013) provide empirical evidence that men and women who are high in Machiavellianism (the desire to further self-interest regardless of the cost) more intensively attempt to ingratiate themselves than women low in it. Individuals who are concerned that their group membership may lead to negative impressions, such as gays and lesbians (Jones & King, 2014) and Asian Americans (Roberts, Cha, & Kim, 2014), often actively seek to manage their self-presentations.