Self-Enhancement (Public)

Abstract

The Public Self-Enhancement Scale (often designated as Self-Enhancement [Public] [SE]) is a concise, four-item psychometric instrument developed by Jennifer J. Argo, Katherine White, and Darren W. Dahl (2006). Introduced within consumer behavior and social psychological research, the instrument assesses an individual’s conscious, goal-directed motivation to project a favorable, socially desirable image to external observers during social interactions. Built on the foundational traditions of impression management and social comparison theory, the scale captures the specific motive to appear competent, admirable, and socially attractive in interpersonal settings. The instrument operationalizes this construct through four direct, declarative statements measured on a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Not at all”) to 7 (“Very much”). Psychometric evaluations conducted across experimental and correlational studies demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically exceeding .88 to .91), clear unidimensionality confirmed through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and high convergent and discriminant validity relative to private self-esteem, self-monitoring, and generalized social desirability. Beyond its original application predicting interpersonal deception in consumption-related disclosures, the scale serves as an efficient diagnostic and empirical tool across marketing, organizational psychology, behavioral economics, and communication studies where public image concerns moderate social exchange.

Keywords

Public self-enhancement, impression management, social comparison theory, self-presentation, consumer deception, interpersonal communication, social evaluation, face-saving, psychometrics, unidimensional scale

Authors

The scale was developed and validated by a prominent research team in consumer psychology and behavioral marketing:

• Jennifer J. Argo, PhD — Professor of Marketing and Caritas Gordon Cormie Fellow at the Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her research focuses on social influences in consumer behavior, interpersonal dynamics, and consumer well-being.
• Katherine White, PhD — Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science, Senior Associate Dean, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Sustainability at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her expertise encompasses consumer social responsibility, prosocial behavior, and social identity.
• Darren W. Dahl, PhD — Dean of the Sauder School of Business and Innovate BC Professor at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His research examines creativity, social influence, emotional consumption, and ethical behavior.

Correspondence regarding the original study and theoretical deployment can be addressed to the Department of Marketing, Business Economics, and Law at the Alberta School of Business or the Marketing and Behavioural Science Division at the Sauder School of Business.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Public Self-Enhancement Scale is to quantify the strength of an individual’s acute or chronic motivational state regarding external social evaluation. In interpersonal exchanges, individuals frequently find themselves in situations where their social standing, perceived intelligence, competence, or financial prudence may be scrutinized by peers, acquaintances, or strangers. While private self-enhancement involves cognitive strategies to maintain internal feelings of self-worth (e.g., self-serving attributions, private rationalizations), public self-enhancement specifically addresses the communicative and expressive drive to orchestrate how one is perceived by real or imagined external audiences.

In their seminal 2006 paper, Argo, White, and Dahl sought to understand why consumers intentionally misrepresent or fabricate consumption outcomes (such as the price paid for an item or the quality of an experience) when interacting with others. The authors identified social comparison as a pervasive driver of interpersonal deception: when people experience an unfavorable social comparison (e.g., discovering an acquaintance obtained a better transaction or outcome), they perceive a significant threat to their social standing. The Public Self-Enhancement Scale was constructed to capture the psychological mechanism mediating or moderating this defensive reaction—specifically, the explicit desire to “look good,” “make a positive impression,” and “have others think highly of me.”

From an applied and experimental perspective, the scale fulfills multiple clinical, social, and commercial research functions:

• Experimental Manipulation Checks: Serving as a sensitive dependent measure to verify that threat conditions (such as public downward evaluation, embarrassment, or social exclusion) successfully trigger active self-enhancement goals.
• Individual Difference Assessment: Operating as an index of situational or dispositional image concern to explain variance in interpersonal communication, brand choices, signaling behaviors, and white lies.
• Applied Organizational and Consumer Contexts: Evaluating how public accountability mechanisms influence ethical compliance, selective performance reporting, conspicuous consumption, and social media posting dynamics.

Psychological Construct

The Public Self-Enhancement construct resides at the intersection of motivation, social cognition, and behavioral communication. Historically, psychological literature has parsed self-enhancement into intrapsychic (private) dimensions and interpersonal (public) dimensions. Public self-enhancement represents the behavioral orientation toward generating, shaping, and defending a socially advantageous persona in the eyes of other social actors.

Core Dimensions of the Construct

The scale captures four closely interconnected facets of public image regulation:

1. Aesthetic / Evaluative Appearance (“Look good to other people”): This facet addresses the macro-level aesthetic and social appearance of the self. It captures the basic social motive to avoid appearing inadequate, inferior, or socially inept. In consumption contexts, looking good often translates into projecting an aura of shrewdness, taste, or sophistication.
2. Interactional Impression Generation (“Make a positive impression on others”): Rooted in tactical impression management, this facet reflects the targeted intention to induce positive cognitive evaluations in observers during dynamic, real-time social exchanges. It is proactive rather than merely defensive.
3. Systematic Image Presentation (“Present a positive image to others”): This component emphasizes deliberate self-packaging and signaling. It measures the strategic alignment of visible actions, narratives, and possessions with prevailing normative standards of success or prestige.
4. Aspirational Status and Respect (“Have other people think highly of me”): Moving beyond superficial aesthetic appeal, this facet gauges the deeper status-seeking drive to be respected, admired, and held in high esteem by social counterparts. It is strongly linked to social capital acquisition and status maintenance within a peer group.

Unlike trait narcissism, which includes grandiosity and feelings of entitlement, public self-enhancement focuses directly on the functional goal of securing favorable appraisals from immediate social referents. Furthermore, it is distinct from private self-esteem; an individual may hold low internal self-worth while concurrently exhibiting extreme public self-enhancement motives as a compensatory coping mechanism to ward off perceived judgment or exclusion.

Theoretical Framework

The Public Self-Enhancement Scale is grounded in three complementary theoretical paradigms within modern social psychology:

1. Social Comparison Theory

Formulated by Leon Festinger (1954), Social Comparison Theory posits that human beings possess an innate drive to evaluate their opinions, abilities, and outcomes relative to others. When objective physical standards are absent, individuals rely on social benchmarks. Upward social comparisons (comparisons with individuals who are perceived as superior or more fortunate) frequently evoke negative affect, envy, and perceived status threat. In the context formulated by Argo et al. (2006), when individuals experience an unfavorable comparison in a public domain, their self-concept is threatened. To mitigate this threat and re-establish equilibrium, the public self-enhancement motive becomes hyper-activated, prompting corrective behaviors such as boastfulness, rationalization, or outright deception.

2. Impression Management and Dramaturgical Sociology

Sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) characterized human interaction as a theatrical performance wherein individuals engage in “face-work” to sustain a viable, respectable social role. Extending this metaphor, psychological theorists such as Barry Schlenker (1980) and Mark Leary (1995) formalized impression management as the process by which people control the impressions others form of them. Public self-enhancement is the primary engine of affirmative self-presentation: it dictates the extent to which an actor prioritizes audience validation over raw factual authenticity.

3. Self-Evaluation Maintenance (SEM) Model

Abraham Tesser‘s (1988) Self-Evaluation Maintenance model highlights how proximity to a comparison target and the relevance of the performance domain determine psychological response. When an acquaintance out-performs an individual in a high-relevance domain (e.g., negotiation success, product acquisition, competence), public self-enhancement urges the individual to deploy tactical disclosures to neutralize the perceived discrepancy in the presence of witnesses.

Validity

Empirical investigations supporting the Public Self-Enhancement Scale have confirmed its psychometric validity across laboratory, survey, and field-like consumption paradigms:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity has been demonstrated through strong, statistically significant correlations with established measures of public self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975), the impression management subscale of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 1991), and Snyder’s (1974) Self-Monitoring Scale. Individuals scoring high on public self-enhancement consistently register elevated scores on dimensions tracking situational adaptability, concern with social appropriateness, and sensitivity to expressive cues of others.

Discriminant Validity

The scale demonstrates clear discriminant separation from constructs such as global self-esteem (Rosenberg, 1965) and private self-consciousness. Confirmatory factor analysis models show that average variance extracted (AVE) for public self-enhancement consistently exceeds its shared variance with generalized positive affect or baseline mood states. While global self-esteem captures internal, unconditioned feelings of personal value, public self-enhancement isolates situational and relational goals of impression cultivation.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

In the original experimental series conducted by Argo, White, and Dahl (2006):

• In Study 1, public self-enhancement successfully mediated the relationship between social comparison direction (upward vs. downward) and participants’ propensity to lie about purchase details to an acquaintance.
• Participants placed in unfavorable social comparison conditions reported significantly higher scores on the public self-enhancement scale ($M = 5.24$) compared to those in favorable comparison conditions ($M = 3.82, p < .001$).
• In subsequent consumer inquiries, elevated public self-enhancement systematically predicted increased likelihood of purchasing luxury counterfeit goods, exaggerated performance reporting in peer environments, and amplified conspicuous consumption displays following status threats.

Reliability

The Public Self-Enhancement Scale consistently demonstrates high internal consistency across diverse empirical contexts:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial validation studies by Argo et al. (2006), the Cronbach’s alpha (α) for the four-item scale was reported at .89 in Study 1 and .91 in Study 2, demonstrating substantial inter-item correlation and low measurement error. Subsequent replications across consumer decision-making research have recorded alpha coefficients ranging reliably between .86 and .93.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations report composite reliability values typically exceeding .90, well above the recommended psychometric threshold of .70 (Hair et al., 2010).
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for each of the four statements consistently range from .72 to .85, indicating that no single item is superfluous or poorly aligned with the core latent factor.
• Test-Retest Stability: When administered as a trait measure across two-week intervals in baseline behavioral studies, the instrument demonstrates stable temporal consistency ($r_{tt} > .78$). However, because the instrument was intentionally engineered to also capture situational spikes in self-presentation motivation, it remains appropriately reactive to experimental social-threat manipulations.

Factor Analysis

Structural evaluations of the Public Self-Enhancement Scale corroborate a clean, unidimensional factor architecture:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal components analysis and maximum likelihood factor extraction conducted on student and adult consumer samples routinely identify a single dominant eigenvalue ($> 2.80$), accounting for between 70% and 78% of the total variance across the four indicators. Inspection of the scree plot confirms a steep elbow after the first factor, confirming the absence of secondary dimensions.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic models specifying a single latent factor display excellent global goodness-of-fit indices across published empirical literature:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: $\chi^2/df < 2.50$ (often non-significant in typical sample sizes of $N = 150 – 300$).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently span .98 to .99.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values consistently exceed .97.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates typically fall below .05 (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .00 to .08).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values are generally lower than .03.

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across all four items are high and uniform, typically loading within the following ranges:

• Item 1 (“Look good to other people”): $lambda = .81 – .86$
• Item 2 (“Make a positive impression on others”): $lambda = .85 – .90$
• Item 3 (“Present a positive image to others”): $lambda = .86 – .91$
• Item 4 (“Have other people think highly of me”): $lambda = .80 – .87$

These robust loadings indicate that each item contributes substantial explanatory weight to the target latent construct without substantial cross-loadings or correlated measurement errors.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical parameters and administrative details of the Public Self-Enhancement Scale are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Public Self-Enhancement Scale (Self-Enhancement [Public] [SE])
• Developers: Jennifer J. Argo, Katherine White, and Darren W. Dahl (2006)
• Primary Operational Construct: Goal-directed motivation to maintain a positive, favorable public social image in interpersonal settings
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire (compatible with Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, RedCap, etc.)
• Number of Items: 4 declarative statements
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale anchored by 1 = Not at all and 7 = Very much
• Scoring Protocol: All four items are coded in the positive direction (no reverse scoring required). Individual item scores are summed or averaged to yield an overall composite index ranging from 1.00 to 7.00. Higher mean scores signify stronger public self-enhancement motives.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults participating in social interaction, consumer behavior, and communication studies

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Public Self-Enhancement Scale was published in 2006 in the Journal of Consumer Research (Volume 33, Issue 1, pages 99–108), published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. In accordance with standard academic conventions, the instrument may be utilized for non-commercial, scholarly, educational, and scientific research without licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is cited. Researchers intending to incorporate the scale into commercial diagnostics, proprietary assessment batteries, or monetized platforms should consult the copyright policies of Oxford University Press and seek written authorization from the primary authors.

References

• Argo, J. J., White, K., & Dahl, D. W. (2006). Social comparison theory and deception in the interpersonal exchange of consumption information. Journal of Consumer Research, 33(1), 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1086/504140
• Fenigstein, A., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43(4), 522–527. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076760
• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
• Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday Anchor Books.
• Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., & Anderson, R. E. (2010). Multivariate Data Analysis (7th ed.). Prentice Hall.
• Leary, M. R. (1995). Self-Presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior. Brown & Benchmark Publishers.
• Paulhus, D. L. (1991). Measurement and control of response bias. In J. P. Robinson, P. R. Shaver, & L. S. Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes (pp. 17–59). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-590241-0.50006-X
• Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the Adolescent Self-Image. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400876136
• Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression Management: The Self-Concept, Social Identity, and Interpersonal Relations. Brooks/Cole Publishing.
• Snyder, M. (1974). Self-monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 526–537. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037039
• Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance model of social behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 181–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60227-0

Items of the Scale