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Abstract
We examined the disclosure of sexual attitudes in self-presentational contexts across different levels of accountability. The results indicated that in a self-presentation situation participants expressed more reserved sexual attitudes in a low-accountability (i.e., stranger) compared to a high-accountability (i.e., friend) condition. Conversely, in a non-self-presentation situation sexual attitudes did not differ as a function of accountability conditions. Moreover, participants expressed greater accountability concerns with friends compared to strangers, a finding that heretofore has been absent from the literature. In fact, perceived accountability mediated the interactive effect of self-presentation and accountability on sexual attitudes, again a finding that has yet to be demonstrated in prior work. These findings are the first to illustrate how people convey their sexual attitudes for self-presentational purposes, and they provide a more nuanced and complete view of people's self-presentations.
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Notes
1 We focused on the self-presentation of attitudes toward sex in general, rather than on more specific or emotionally laden issues (e.g., sexual orientation, HIV disclosure, sexual abuse).
2 Details available from corresponding author.
3 We suspect that similar means for the public:friend, private:friend, and private:stranger conditions were due to a relative ceiling effect where there is a modest limit to how “permissive” people actually are.
4 Although intimacy motives may have been at play, we posit that in the current context such motives were less salient, with the results suggesting that accountability concerns were much more prominent.