A Study Of Self-Mockery From Impression Management Approach

Self-mockery, considered as a prevalent communicative strategy, plays a crucial role in smooth interaction. However, only little attention has been paid to it and all the previous studies could be categorized into the following three approaches:the literary approach, the linguistic approach and the sociological approach. After the analysis of the achievements and limitations of the previous research, it is not difficult to find that the previous research on self-mockery has not revealed the complicated psychological elements hidden in this dynamic process. Put differently, the reason why people employ self-mockery as their communicative strategy in certain circumstances is still unknown.In view of the limitations in the previous studies, the current research aims to probe into the psychological reason why people employ self-mockery as their communicative strategy and present a more systematical and comprehensive analysis of self-mockery from the social psychological perspective, on the basis of the two-component model of impression management, put forward by Leary and Kowalski in 1990. The two components are impression motivation and impression construction. Impression motivation refers to the motivations that drive people to monitor their impressions through the employment of certain kinds of strategies and impression construction refers to the impressions that people attempt to make on others and the ways in which they construct their desired impressions. The present investigation concentrates on the two discrete processes of self-mockery and it is a qualitative study based on the data mainly extracted from journals and daily communication.Before the analysis, it is necessary to give a definition of self-mockery appropriate for the perspective of the current research. After the thorough study of the data collected, it is concluded that self-mockery should include the following two features:(1) adopting ridiculous language and (2) being considered as a communicative strategy to realize certain communicative goals.By applying the two-component model of impression management to the study on self-mockery, it is found that the primary self-presentational motive that drives people to employ self-mockery to tailor their impressions is the desire to maximize the expected rewards and/or minimize the expected punishment (Schlenker,1980). More specifically, people adopt self-mockery as their self-presentational strategy in order to obtain desired social and material outcomes (such as approval, partnership, trust, respect, likability, the some desired things, and the improvement of current situation), to construct and maintain self (including self-esteem and identities), and to regulate emotion. The impressions that they attempt to convey to others through the employment of self-mockery are mainly the ones of their personal attributes, such as being humorous, optimistic, self-confident, witty, etc., and the ways in which they construct these impressions are to mock characteristics of their physical appearance, the faults in their behavior and embarrassing situations.The current study provides a systematic explanation to impression motivation and impression construction of self-mockery employed in verbal interaction, which could help us communicate with others more smoothly so as to increase the expected rewards and/or decrease the expected costs in life by leading others to form certain impressions of us in certain social settings.