Psychological Bulletin !990, Vol. 107, No. I, 34-47 Copyright 3 990 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. QG33-2909/90/$00.?5 Impression Management: A Literature Review and Two-Component Model Mark R. Leary and Robin M. Kowalski Wake Forest University Impression management, the process by which people control the impressions others form of them, plays an important role in interpersonal behavior. This article presents a 2-component model within which the literature regarding impression management is reviewed. This model conceptualizes im- pression management as being composed of 2 discrete processes. The 1st involves impression moti- vation—the degree to which people are motivated to control how others see them. Impression moti- vation is conceptualized as a function of 3 factors: the goal-relevance of the impressions one creates, the value of desired outcomes, and the discrepancy between current and desired images. The 2nd component involves impression construction. Five factors appear to determine the kinds of impres- sions people try to construct: the self-concept, desired and undesired identity images, role con- straints, target's values, and current social image. The 2-component model provides coherence to the literature in the area, addresses controversial issues, and supplies a framework for future research regarding impression management. People have an ongoing interest in how others perceive and evaluate them. Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars on diets, cosmetics, and plastic surgery—all intended to make them more attractive to others. Political candidates are pack- aged for the public's consumption like automobiles or breakfast cereals. Parents stress to their children the importance of first impressions and, when trying to control public misbehaviors, may admonish them to consider "what the neighbors will think." Millions of people become paralyzed at the prospect of speaking or performing in public because they are worried about the audience's evaluation of them. Even in relatively mundane encounters at home, work, school, and elsewhere, people monitor others' reactions to them and often try to con- vey images of themselves that promote their attainment of de- sired goals. Impression management (also called self-presentation) refers to the process by which individuals attempt to control the im- pressions others form of them. Because the impressions people make on others have implications for how others perceive, eval- uate, and treat them, as well as for their own views of them- selves, people sometimes behave in ways that will create certain impressions in others' eyes. Although most writers have used the terms impression man- agement and self-presentation interchangeably, some have dis- tinguished between them. Schlenker (1980), for example, de- nned impression management as the "attempt to control im- ages that are projected in real or imagined social interactions" and reserved the term self-presentation for instances in which the projected images are "self-relevant" (p. 6). Presumably, peo- ple may manage the impressions of entities other than them- Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mark R. Leary, Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, Post Office Box 7778, Reynolda Station, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27109. selves, such as businesses, cities, and other people. Similarly, D. J. Schneider (1981) pointed out that impressions may be managed by means other than self-presentation. For example, impressions of an individual may be managed by a third party. In general, then, impression management is a broader and more encompassing term than self-presentation. However, because most research has dealt with how people control the impres- sions others form of them (for which both terms are appropri- ate), we use the terms interchangeably. Some theorists have suggested that self-presentation involves not only people's attempts to manage the impressions others form, but also efforts to control their impressions of themselves as well (Greenwald & Breckler, 1985; Hogan, Jones, & Cheek, 1985; Schlenker, 1985). Although we acknowledge that people are motivated to maintain particular beliefs about themselves (Greenwald & Breckler, 1985), we dispute that this should be regarded as "self-presentation to the self." Our conceptualization of self-presentation coincides with those who have defined impression management (or self-pre- sentation) only in terms of fostering impressions in others' eyes (Arkin & Baumgardner, 1986; Baumeister, 1982b; Baumeister & Tice, 1986; Goffman, 1959; E. E. Jones & Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 1980; D. J. Schneider, 1981; Tedeschi, 1986). The issue is more than semantic. We see conceptual drawbacks to regarding the maintenance of private self-images and the main- tenance of public impressions as the same phenomenon (see Tedeschi, 1986). Most important, the psychological manifestations of these two processes are often quite different. In most instances, the maintenance of private self-perceptions is mediated purely by cognitive processes. In their discussion of this issue, Greenwald and Breckler (1985) described several phenomena that reflect people's interest in maintaining desired private identities, such as self-serving attributions in private settings. However, each of their examples involves purely cognitive processes. To the ex- 34