I Don't Care What Other People Think About Me

If someone were to ask, most of us would say" I don't care what other people think about me". However, people spend an immense amount of time trying to alter other's impression of who we are and, what we represent by the clothes we wear, cars we drive and the social institutions one may chose to belong to. This is known as impression management, which is the process of consciously trying to influence what others are thinking about us during an interaction. Impression management is consciously used in most relational social interactions.

One of the ways in which impression management is used relationally is when a person is dating. The first encounter with a person is usually what tends to shape the opinion of each person. Therefore, people will usually send a representative on the first date and leave their real self at home in an effort to make a "good impression" on what could be a perspective mate. One may select certain clothes that they would not normally wear, or rehearse responses to conversations that we would not normally entertain. While these things may appear to be innocent at the time, if the relationship progresses further and a person does not continue with the same character they presented upfront this could be considered a misrepresentation of one self. There are varies motives for impression management within the dating realm. A person may want to shield character flaws, or feelings of inadequacy and low self esteem which, may lead to a need to recreate themselves in a different reality within this particular social interaction.

Another way in which impression management is used would be in the workplace. This management starts at the application process and the submission of the resume. Most companies use the resume as the evaluation and elimination process. People usually take this opportunity to make sure that they outline their "best self" within a resume to try and secure a face to face encounter. Some have even gone to the extremes and embellished or even falsified a great deal of the information on the resume to achieve those same affects. In management there are two types of behaviors of impression management--concealment or attribution (Merkl-Davies & Breenan, 2007). Concealment is achieved when you either disguise negative news or reinforce positive news. Attribution is a tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than for failures. The motivation for these behaviors is to achieve one of several goals. One of which is the maximization of social and material outcomes. The higher the value attached to these particular outcomes, the stronger the motivation for impression management becomes.

Thirdly, and possibly the most prevalent in today's society is impression management done in cyberspace. In this social interaction people are strategically communicating an e-version