When Self-Presentation Becomes Self-Evidence: The Audience-Weighted Self-Evidence Model of Personality Change

Full abstract

Abstract

Self-presentation is usually treated as an attempt to shape other people’s impressions, whereas personality development concerns enduring patterns of thought, feeling, motivation, and behavior. This integrative review introduces the Audience-Weighted Self-Evidence (AWSE) model to explain when an aspirational presentation remains a display, shifts an accessible self-view, organizes sustained conduct, or contributes to personality change. AWSE distinguishes two evidentiary routes from one structural route. Enacted evidence comes from self-authored performance. Reflected evidence comes from perceived audience appraisal, weighted by diagnostic access, independence, credibility, relevance, and nonredundancy. Social affordances alter opportunities, expectations, sanctions, and treatment without requiring identity updating. Route-specific discounting weakens evidence attributed to coercion, instrumentality, poor access, flattery, or low credibility. The model’s signature prediction is a strict Recognition × Behavioral Entailment crossover: recognition should reduce delayed private transfer when a claim is symbolically complete but increase transfer when later conduct is necessary to sustain its credibility. Eight falsifiable propositions distinguish AWSE from neighboring accounts. A five-study, preregistration-ready program tests source weighting, appraisal-affordance dissociation, the recognition crossover, audience structure, and persistent cross-context development. The complete causal cascade and the crossover remain untested predictions rather than established effects. Personality change is reserved for delayed, multi-method effects that generalize appropriately and survive removal of the initiating claim and audience.