Individual differences in children's understanding of social evaluation concerns

Recent research suggests that children's understanding of self-presentational behaviour-behaviour designed to shape social evaluation-is a function of both cognitive and motivational variables. Furthermore, the motivational factors involved are likely to reflect individual differences in the salience of concerns about social evaluation. The present research represents a first effort to determine whether measures of such differences are indeed associated with the understanding of self-presentational behaviour. In a first experiment, a teacher rating measure of self-monitoring was found to be positively associated with the understanding of self-presentational motives. In a second experiment, a more narrowly specified self-report measure of public self-consciousness was found to have a similar association with the understanding of self-presentation, with no such association found for private self-consciousness. These preliminary results make it clear that our formulations of development in social cognition must indeed include a consideration of individual differences in motivational orientations.