SNYDER (a student of Bem) constructed and validated a scale of self-monitoring (SM) of expressive behavior. As a variation of Bem’s idea that some people are trait like and some are not, people high on SM would be situational, while people low on SM would be trait like. Someone high on SM would have the following goals in life:

1. To be able to communicate accurately one’s emotional state,

2. To communicate accurately an arbitrary emotional state which need not be congruent with the actual emotional experience,

3. To conceal adaptively an inappropriate emotional state and appear to be experiencing an appropriate one, and

4. To appear to be experiencing some emotion when one experiences nothing and a nonresponse is inappropriate.

Self monitoring people observe and control their self presentation and expressive behavior, they are acutely sensitive to situational changes and control their behavior so they are socially appropriate. Low self-monitoring people are more internally controlled.

The SM scale originally contained 41 rationally chosen questions. An internal consistency analysis using 192 Stanford under grads deleted 16 items to the final 25, which has a test-retest reliabiltiy of .83 over 1 mo.

The first validity study of fraternity brothers showed a significant correlation of SM with peer rating of SM (r=.45), which is greater than the “personality coefficient” of .3.

A second validity study showed that professional actors scored significantly higher on SM than a group of psychiatric patients.

A third validity study had the upper and lower quartiles of college student scorers on the SM scale read aloud a 3 sentence neutral paragraph, reflecting 1 of 7 emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear, and guilt. These were taped and then rated by a separate group of those low and high on SM. High SM folks were better at portraying the different emotions than low SM folks. There was also a trend for High SM folks to be better judges of emotion than low SM folks.

In a fourth validity study High and Low SM were asked to respond to a series of T-F statements in a self-descriptive personality test in preparation for a discussion of how test-takers decide to respond to ambiguous questions. Participants were told that they could consult a majority response sheet that revealed how most people answered each question. Observations indicated that high SM folks consulted the majority response sheet more often than low SM folks.

The Sander study is particularly convincing because it represent a SERIES of validity studies, all showing consistent results.