When Do People Misrepresent Themselves to Others? The Effects of Social Desirability, Ground Truth, and Accountability on Deceptive Self-Presentations

Following Leary's (1995) impression management model, three experiments assessed factors that affect deceptive self-presentations of height and weight. One experiment examined the role of biased cognitive processing. It revealed interactions between biased scanningfocusing on one's own socially desirable characteristicsand participants' sex that affected discrepancies between actual and self-reported height/weight. Another investigated the effect of establishing ground truth prior to self-assessment. It determined that exposure to one's actual measures (ground truth) prior to self-report reduced inaccuracy. The third examined the role of perceived accountability. It found that anticipation of being measured reduced discrepant self-reports. Results suggest that psychological and social processes provide higher-order explanations for distorted self-presentations of the kind that other studies have attributed to specific goals and sociotechnological factors.