One’s Actions “Aging Poorly”: An Integrative Egocentric Framework for Understanding Impression Management Errors and the Challenge of Temporal Impression Management

Abstract

Academic Abstract: Why do people struggle to make positive impressions? Indeed, there are now many documented impression mismanagement effects across the psychological literature, highlighting many ways in which actors make negative impressions on observers despite intending to make positive ones. In this article, we use the process model of egocentrism (i.e., people’s tendencies to take others’ perspectives by first anchoring on—then insufficiently adjusting from—their own perspective) to integrate and understand actors’ errors under a single parsimonious conceptual framework. We then use this framework to advance the literature, highlighting how the same logic of egocentric anchoring and adjustment can help shine novel light on the challenge of temporal impression management—that is, how present actors may mistakenly behave in ways that future observers deem negative, even if present observers deem them positive (i.e., one’s actions “aging poorly”). We review and integrate diverse support for these ideas and highlight novel research directions. Public Abstract: This article highlights how people over-attend to their own present states when trying to make positive impressions on others, explaining why people struggle to make them. This problem grows worse over time, leading people to neglect how their present actions might “age poorly” into the future. Strategies that target people’s temporal thinking can therefore help people better navigate today’s rapidly changing informational landscape. Indeed, the notion of “aging poorly” is of increasing real-world relevance and concern (e.g., in today’s online contexts, whereby actors leave concrete digital footprints of their present actions for future observers to discover and judge anew)—this article provides a framework for understanding these issues (e.g., who is more vs. less prone to acting in ways that “age poorly,” and when and why is this the case?) and generates a research agenda for studying them, which includes how actors can better navigate their temporal impressions moving forward.