Self-monitoring, a concept introduced in the 1970s by Mark Snyder, describes the extent to which people monitor their self-presentations, expressive behavior, and nonverbal affective displays.
[1] Snyder held that human beings generally differ in substantial ways in their abilities and desires to engage in expressive controls (see dramaturgy).
[2] Self-monitoring is defined as a personality trait that refers to an ability to regulate behavior to accommodate social situations.
People concerned with their expressive self-presentation (see impression management) tend to closely monitor their audience in order to ensure appropriate or desired public appearances.
[4] Recent studies suggest that a distinction should be made between acquisitive and protective self-monitoring due to their different interactions with metatraits.
[6] In comparison to low self-monitors, high self monitors participate in more expressive control and have a concern for situational appropriateness.
[13] It has been shown that there is a significant relation between an individual's performance at his/her job and his or her ability to change their self-presentation in order to most adapt to the situation.
[15] Some of the reasons why it is difficult to use individual difference variables to predict job performance is because there is a failure to consider contextual effects such as informational influence and pressures for conformity.
The nature of this job makes it likely that an individual's performance in this role is likely to be influenced by the degree to which that person can perceive, understand and adapt to different social situations as appropriate.
High self-monitors are more likely to believe in the idea that there are multiple people one can love, and focus on attributes such as physical attractiveness,[21][22][23][9] sex appeal,[23] social status, and financial resources.
[24] Low self-monitors, on the other hand, look for a social context that gives them the freedom and security to express their emotions and dispositions freely without any interpersonal conflicts.
They are more likely to believe in the idea of “one true love” and look for attributes such as personality desirability,[21][22][9] similarity of values and beliefs, and other dispositions like honesty, responsibility, and kindness.
Self-monitoring typically uses technology to deliver audible or tactile cues at selected intervals to prompt a child to observe and record his/her own behavior.
The relationship between self-monitoring and career mobility in particular was studied with a research pool of Masters of Business Administration graduates.
[29] The initial confusion arose because factor analyses were conducted which revealed that the structure of most items on the Self-Monitoring Scale was multifactorial.
[29] Additionally, they argue that the external criterion variables are generally most directly tapped by the Self-Monitoring Scale rather than being tapped by the measures of Extraversion, Social Surgency, or Other-Directedness, meaning that Self-Monitoring can better describe the factors that contribute to a person's personality than the combination of these.
[30] Through a 100-person experiment, it was found out that high-self monitors more quickly linked positive personality traits to themselves following exposure to impression-related words, proving high self-monitors possess a heightened capacity to cognitively process self-presentation information.
They are also, compared to low self-monitors, more likely to recall personal information about an upcoming interaction partner, are better able to judge emotional displays, are more skilled at decoding nonverbal behaviors, show better performance on interpersonal perception tasks, are more focused on their interaction partners, and they seek out and consider more information about an audience when trying to convey a particular identity.
People low in self-monitoring, however, would behave as themselves in most cases and hence not have an option in the self-presentation that they project, as well as being less sensitive to social information present around them.
Studies that evaluate private attitudes and public actions include Ajzen, Timko, and White, 1982;[32] and DeBono and Omoto, 1993.