Can You Blend in Anywhere? Or Are You Always the Same You?

New York Magazine:

There are those people — you know who you are — who always know just what to say, and how to behave, and what to wear, no matter where they are or whom they’re with. You could invite them to a black-tie wedding or trivia night at a dive bar, and either way, they’ll figure out how to fit right in.

And then there are those — you know who you are, too — who are always, utterly themselves, no matter the context. After all, they reason, why would anyone want to go around faking their personality?

Mark Snyder, a psychology researcher at the University of Minnesota, has been dividing the world in two this way for as long as he can remember. Eventually, this instinct led to the Self-Monitoring Scale, which has been used for more than four decades to research these two ways of being. “Self-monitoring gets at a fundamental difference between people, on whether your view of how to handle social situations is to fit yourself to the context and to play a role versus, whether you view it as finding a way to do what you want, express who you are, show other people your true inner self,” Snyder told Science of Us.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine