CHAPTER
16
Measures of Concerns with Public
Image and Social Evaluation
Mark R. Leary, Katrina P . Jongman-Sereno and Kate J. Diebels
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
People’s outcomes in life are greatly affected by other people’s impressions and evaluations of them. Whether
people are perceived as friendly or unfriendly, intelligent or stupid, sincere or duplicitous, dependable or irre-
sponsible, or in myriad other ways has broad-ranging implications for how they fare in their social, occupational,
romantic, financial, and other pursuits. As a result, people are attuned to how they are being perceived and eval-
uated by others, often try to behave in ways that convey impressions of themselves to others that will result in
desired outcomes, and sometimes become distressed when others do not perceive and evaluate them as they
desire ( Leary, 1995; Schlenker, 2012 ).
Although being concerned with other people’s judgments is sometimes viewed as a sign of insecurity, vanity,
deceit, or manipulativeness, in fact, social-evaluative concerns are a normal and adaptive aspect of human behav-
ior. Concerns with social evaluations keep socially undesirable behaviors in check and facilitate smooth and
rewarding social interactions. People who pay insufficient attention to how they are viewed by others fare very
poorly in domains of life in which others’ evaluations may affect their outcomes. Indeed, a world in which no
one cared how they were viewed by other people would be intolerable for everyone.
Although most people occasionally become concerned with how they are perceived and evaluated by others,
individuals differ in the degree to which they are attuned to other people’s evaluations of them, are motivated to
make desired impressions on others, experience distress when their public images are damaged or others’ evalua-
tions of them are unfavorable, and use various tactics to convey impressions of themselves to other people. This
chapter focuses on measures of personality characteristics that reflect individual differences in such concerns.
These differences in concerns with public image and social evaluation moderate people’s behavior when the
importance of others’ evaluations is salient and help to predict an array of behaviors and emotions that are tied
to people’s concerns with others’ impressions and evaluations of them ( Leary, 1995 ).
People’s concerns with public image and social evaluations are reflected in a number of psychological pro-
cesses involving attentional, motivational, emotional, and behavioral elements. These features are obviously cor-
related and interdependent, yet they reflect distinct processes that underlie individual differences in social-
evaluative concerns.
First, people differ in the degree to which they think about other people’s impressions of them and desire to
be evaluated in particular ways. Some people think a great deal about their public images, are cognizant that
others might be evaluating them, and mull over the possibility of making undesired impressions. Other people
think about their social image and others’ evaluations much less frequently and do so primarily when situational
demands make social evaluation particularly salient. All other things being equal, people who are more attuned
to the fact that other people are scrutinizing or judging them will be more concerned about social evaluations /C0
and more motivated to manage their impressions in ways that convey desired impressions /C0than those who
think less about how they are being viewed by others.
Second, people differ in the degree to which they worry about being perceived and evaluated in undesired
ways and experience emotional distress when the possibility of making undesired impressions arises.
448Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00016-4 ©2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.