Acting, behaving, and the selfless basis of metaperception

The desire to create a particular impression of oneself to others is a fund amental interpersonal motive that should be followed by an assessment of th e success of the self-presentation. The authors integrate the areas of self -presentation and metaperception in the present research by assigning parti cipants to enact roles during 2 dyadic interactions and measuring the actor s' metaperceptions and their partners' trait judgments. They found a high l evel of accuracy in actors' metaperceptions but no accuracy in partners' tr ait judgments of the actors. Instead, partners' trait judgments corresponde d closely to the actors' interpersonal behavior, indicating that there was little or no "personality leakage" in the actors' behavior. Random assignme nt to role created a situation in which private self was uncorrelated with public self. Results indicate that actors were able to disregard their self -concepts when determining the impressions they created.