Triggering self-presentation efforts outside of people's conscious awareness

Three studies utilized priming techniques to examine whether self-presentations can be activated without conscious awareness. the results across all experiments consistently demonstrated nonconscious self-presentation effects,in that people were unaware that their self-presentations were triggered automatically and that their self-presentations were comparable to participants who were explicitly instructed to self-present. the findings are novel because they are the first to demonstrate that self-presentations can be triggered without conscious awareness in a manner similar to self-presentations that are strategically selected. in addition,the results help undermine the common misconception that self-presentation typically involves conscious deliberation,pretense,or outright deception. © 2012 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc.