People Understand the Different Impressions They Make

This article reexamines the prevailing conclusion that people are unaware of the different impressions they make, or that their differential meta-accuracy is poor. This conclusion emerged from research employing contextually undifferentiated designs that may have constrained differences in actual impressions, thereby limiting participants’ ability to demonstrate differential metaaccuracy. We argue that an alternative, contextually differentiated approach may reveal evidence for differential meta-accuracy because (a) people tend to behave differently in different social contexts, (b) interaction partners from different social contexts witness differing behaviors and form differing impressions of a target person, and (c) contextual information used to infer the impression one makes on others is relatively differentiated across contexts, resulting in differentiated metaperceptions. We assessed differential meta-accuracy across social contexts (i.e., parents, hometown friends, and college friends) and found that, in contrast to researchers’ prevailing conclusion, people can indeed detect the relative impressions they make on others. People often reflect upon the impressions they create in others. These metaperceptions (Laing, Phillipson, & Lee, 1966) often guide social behavior, and the accuracy of metaperceptions, or meta-accuracy, may have important implications for interpersonal functioning (Anderson, Ames, & Gosling, 2008; Cameron & Vorauer, 2008; Oltmanns, Gleason, Klonsky, & Turkheimer, 2005; Tice & Wallace, 2003). Despite the potential importance of meta-accuracy, it appears that for personality traits, ‘‘people seem to have just a glimmer of insight into how they are uniquely viewed by particular other people’’ (Kenny & DePaulo, 1993, p. 151). This prevailing conclusion has had implications for understanding the processes of metaperception and, most generally, for fundamental beliefs about people’s understanding of their social environments (Albright, Forest, & Reiseter, 2001; Albright & Malloy, 1999; Chambers, Epley, Savitsky, & Windschitl, 2008; Oltmanns et al., 2005; Shechtman & Kenny, 1994). The goal of the current study was to revisit this widely accepted conclusion by adopting a novel, contextually differentiated approach to meta-accuracy. Our reexamination of this fundamental issue suggests that an alternative conclusion is warranted. The conclusion that people fail to detect the different impressions they make is based on studies showing that differential meta-accuracy, or an individual’s ability to detect the different impressions other people hold about him or her, is low for many traits and for a variety of levels of acquaintanceship (Kenny & DePaulo, 1993; Levesque, 1997; Shechtman & Kenny, 1994). However, these studies assessed meta-accuracy among small groups of people within a single social context. For example, researchers often recruited a small group of unacquainted participants who became acquainted with each other within a limited time frame through a single group-level interaction or through a series of brief, in-lab, one-on-one interactions (DePaulo, Kenny, Hoover, Webb, & Oliver, 1987; Malloy & Janowski, 1992; Reno & Kenny, 1992; Shechtman & Kenny, 1994). Similarly, when researchers recruited well-acquainted participants, they did so on the basis of participants’ mutual acquaintanceship in a single social context (Levesque, 1997; Malloy & Albright, 1990). For example, Levesque (1997) recruited small groups of dormitory roommates, obtained their Address correspondence to Erika N. Carlson, Washington University, Department of Psychology, Campus Box 1125, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, e-mail: [email protected]. Differential meta-accuracy is similar to dyadic meta-accuracy, an index of meta-accuracy that emerges from the social relations model (Kenny, 1994). We believe the term differential meta-accuracy more clearly describes the psychological meaning of the phenomenon we examined. In addition, dyadic metaaccuracy is associated with a specific statistical approach differing from the one we adopted. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 20—Number 8 1033 Copyright r 2009 Association for Psychological Science actual impressions and metaperceptions for every other roommate, and—as in studies of first impressions—found that roommates were unable to detect the impressions they made regarding different traits (i.e., the Big Five). Thus, in both types of studies, group members shared the same level of acquaintanceship and knew each other from the same context. Essentially, these studies assessed people’s ability to detect the different impressions they make when others’ impressions are relatively similar. In a single social context, group members base their impressions of a ‘‘target’’ member on the same or highly similar behavioral information. Because people form similar impressions when they are exposed to the same behavioral information (Funder & Sneed, 1993), impressions of a target will be relatively undifferentiated within a single context. Differentiation in impressions is important because targets can accurately perceive the differences among other people’s impressions only if those other people actually have well-differentiated impressions. In a sense, these studies provided targets with a relatively weak signal to detect, in the form of undifferentiated impressions. The current study reexamined the long-accepted and somewhat surprising conclusion that differential meta-accuracy is poor by implementing an alternative, contextually differentiated method. Specifically, for all target participants, we recruited informants from different social contexts and assessed participants’ ability to detect the different impressions they made on their informants. Thus, unlike in most meta-accuracy research, we assessed differential meta-accuracy across social contexts instead of within a single social context. Our emphasis on contextual differentiation has several foundations that, together, suggest that this alternative design will reveal stronger evidence of differential meta-accuracy than undifferentiated designs have. First, targets are likely to behave differently in dissimilar social contexts (Furr & Funder, 2004). Consequently, acquaintances from different social contexts will be exposed to different behavior, therefore forming impressions that are more differentiated than those formed by acquaintances within the same context (Funder, Kolar, & Blackman, 1995; Kenny, 2004; Malloy, Agatstein, Yarlas, & Albright, 1997; Malloy, Albright, Kenny, Agatstein, & Winquist, 1997). In a sense, well-differentiated impressions represent a relatively strong signal for targets to detect. Second, on the basis of knowledge of their own differential behavior across contexts or their observations of acquaintances’ reactions to this differentiated behavior, targets may form notably different metaperceptions across social contexts. Thus, given a strong signal to be detected, in the form of well-differentiated actual impressions, and given a well-differentiated set of metaperceptions, a contextually differentiated approach may reveal strong evidence of differential meta-accuracy—that is, a strong correspondence between differences in the actual impressions of a target and differences in the target’s metaperceptions. In sum, we believe that the ability to perceive the differential impressions one makes on people from different social contexts is a meaningful and socially important facet of metaperception that has not yet been examined. Our contextually differentiated design based on real relationships from participants’ everyday lives represents an opportunity to evaluate differential metaaccuracy in a manner that is both methodologically rigorous and ecologically valid.