The Reaearch Of Relationship Between Impression Management And Individual Attitude Change

Impression Management is an important aspect of Interpersonal interactions. In recent years, it has increasingly received much attention in psychology, and has became a very important research variable. Research proves that, high-low impression managers are completely different in many fields. The high impression managers have better social skills to adjust their behavior to adapt different social environment properly, and the low impression managers are relatively unresponsive to social requirements.The laboratory scene contains 4 elements—the experimenter, the subjects, the attitude object, and the publicity or confidentiality of the experimental situation. There are two main motives to engage in impression management—to please the audience and to construct (create, maintain, and modify) one's public self congruent to one's ideal. It is supposed that, subjects choose impression management functions according to the situation, and the reactions are different between high-low impression managers in the same situation.Based on the consideration above, this paper will investigate whether there are differences between high and low impression managers' explicit attitudes to a certain stranger on the basis of "Forced Compliance" paradigm and "Anticipated Attitude Change" paradigm. Then we will investigate whether their implicit attitude have the same differentcies by Implicit Association Test (IAT). By this way, we can examine the authenticity of the two groups'explicit attitude. The results of the experiments is as follows:1. The publicity/confidentiality of the experimental situation and the possibility of contact with the attitude object affects high impression managers'explicit evaluation, but have no significant impact on the low impression managers. The high impression managers'attitude are more positive in the signature group than in the anonymous group, but the low impression managers'explicit attitude have no significant differences between the two conditions. The high impression managers' implicit attitude didn't change as their explicit attitude. Then the high impression mangers' personal information exposure levels made their explicit attitude and implicit attitude separated.2. After finished the task (lying) that contrary to their attitude according to the experimenter's wishes as the "Forced compliance" paradigm suggested, the high impression managers'attitude change towards the direction of the action (the lies), and had more positive attitude toward the stranger (Li Ming). The low impression managers' attitude didn't change significantly. The high impression managers'attitude change in the explicit test didn't take place in the implicit test. Then the element of "experimenter" made high impression managers' explicit attitude and implicit attitude separated again.3. In the experiment of "Anticipated Attitude Change", the attitude measuring occurs when subjects were anticipating the message (video) hold back the high impression mangers' attitude return to the original level (The level of before knowing the existence of video) when knowing the message was canceled, but didn't prevented the low impression management group. The measurement of implicit attitude found that both groups' implicit attitudes were in a lower level. Then the high impression management group's explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes separated for appearing consistent. It is the element of "subjects" themselves led to the results above.