How Implicit Personality Traits and Impression Management Affect Perception - Essay Sample

Introduction

Implicit personality theory is people's perception that certain traits coincide in a person. A person with a particular personality trait is perceived to have another related habit. The concept is just a mere person's judgment. For instance, a person outgoing may be regarded to be intelligent. Impression management is the act of swaying people's opinions of a person. A person could behave in a certain way intended to give people a positive impression of who they are. Taking advantage of the concept of implicit personality theory, people tend to create people's notion of who they are, and this process is w impression management. Therefore, there are many ways to use implicit personality theory to enhance your impression management and to enhance a personal and professional image.

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Once one has formed an absolute presumption on people's minds, whether negative or positive, it's tough to change it. However, what people choose to believe depends on individual beliefs or stereotypes. For instance, famous people are assumed to be successful or wealthy. In a way, it seems only logical to think that students who have confidence in their intelligence-who believe they are smart-would have nothing to fear from a challenge and would be somehow inoculated against the ravages of failure (Dweck, 2013). A person can use this information by improving their confidence level because high self-esteem is likely to open more opportunities for them. Impression management is such a natural part of an organizational life that is considered to be a significant component of corporate politics (DuBrin, 2010). By utilizing the opportunities granted to them, a person is bound to turn their lives around to fulfill their dreams and desires. For courageous people with high self-esteem tend to be sociable, one can take this advantage to be a leader in any organization they are involved.

Everyone would like people to have a positive image of who they are. Some celebrities, politicians, athletes, and people with expertise in specific fields use impression management to create desired images. People in the workplace are particularly eager to create a positive impression because they want to attain such outcomes as developing allies, getting a raise, getting promoted, receiving a bonus, making a sale, avoiding being placed on the downsizing list, and being hired in the first place (DuBrin, 2010). Although most people believe that impression management is always negative, there is a healthy practice of impression management.

With the rise in the use of social networking sites, people can take advantage of and enhance their impression management. Uploading photos on social websites such as Facebook and MySpace is a way of creating a self-image to the global world. By creating online self-presentations, users have the opportunity to think about which aspects of their personalities should be presented or which photos convey the best images - they can manage their self-presentation more strategically than in face-to-face situations (Kramer, 2008). On the whole, people with high values in self-efficacy concerning self-presentation displayed more significant numbers of friends and gave more information in terms of completed fields and the number of words (Kramer, 2008). People post their photos to improve their profiles. Altogether, it is apparent that self-efficacy influences the level of profile detail, the extent of the contact list, and the style of the profile picture (Kramer, 2008). The theory of implicit personality assumes that people whose photos are good looking and presentable are likely to be successful in accomplishing specific tasks or in certain situations.

Impression management has played a significant role in society. People configure false perceptions through the beliefs that someone possesses. The ideas change from one community to another due to the difference in cultural norms. The perceived characters in people are mostly not the ones they own in reality. Given recent findings that MySpace users with high self-esteem use more words in describing themselves and integrate more pictures and animations of celebrities into their profiles (Banczyk et al., 2008), it would have been plausible to expect similar effects of self-esteem within our StudiVZ sample (Kramer, 2008). The results found no correlation between self-esteem and self-presentation. It is also evident today that most celebrities appear so happy on social media, but that is not the truth in real life.

The other implication of impression management is that people get deceived in choice of what is essential. People choose to give more significance to what people think is right than what is right. Drawing example from the theory of malleable intelligence, people have different perceptions on what intelligence and for a person to prove how intelligent they are, they make the wrong choice. And in fact, students with this view will readily sacrifice opportunities to look smart in favor of opportunities to learn something new (Dweck, 2013). Instead of focusing on more productive activities, people waste much time fixing what people should see in them. Corrupt politicians make use of implicit personality theory to deceive citizens and gain their votes, after which they take care of their interests.

Conclusion

People believe that a person with self-confidence has mastery qualities and is open-minded. My confidence helps people believe in my abilities in tackling issues and has gained popularity and reliability from people. My professional attributes got founded on the fact that people believe in my skills to accomplish the set goals during the set timelines. Although some beliefs on the implicit personality may be true, most of them are based on people's judgment. However, we can always create a positive impression instead of just taking advantage of the theory to mislead people.

References

DuBrin, A. J. (2010). Impression Management in the Workplace: Research, Theory, and Practice. Routledge.

Dweck, C. S. (2013). Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development. Psychology Press.

Kramer, N. C., & Winter, S. (2008). Impression Management 2.0: The Relationship of Self-Esteem, Extraversion, Self-efficacy, and Self-Presentation within Social Networking Sites. Journal of Media Psychology, 20(3), 106-116. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephan_Winter3/publication/200772602_Impression_Management_20_The_Relationship_of_Self-Esteem_Extraversion_Self-Efficacy_and_Self-Presentation_Within_Social_Networking_Sites/links/0deec535ade0894bc8000000.pdf