Choosing friends as activity partners: The role of self-monitoring.

Abstract

Two investigations examined the involvement of self-monitori ng processes in friendship. The first investigation focused on the differential considerations that are involved when high self-monitoring individuals and low self-monitoring individuals choose friends as partners for leisure-time activities. High self-monitoring individuals, more so than low self-monitoring individuals, chose friends as activity partners on the basis of their friends' particular skills in the activity domain. Low self-monitoring individuals, more so than high self-monitoring individuals, chose friends as activity partners on the basis of general feelings of liking for their friends. The second investigation examined the internal structures of the preferred social worlds of high self-monitoring individuals and low self-monitoring individuals. High self-monitoring individuals preferred relatively partitioned and compartmentalized social worlds in which they would engage in particular activities only with specific partners. Low self-monitoring individuals preferred relatively homogeneous and undifferentiated social worlds in which they would spend time with friends who were globally similar to them. The implications of these findings for understanding the processes by which individuals high and low in self-monitoring facilitate the enactment of their characteristic behavioral orientations, as well as for understanding the nature of friendship itself, are discussed. Investigations of self-monitoring processes have identified two orientations that individuals can and do adopt as they enact their behavioral choices in social contexts. Some individuals typically strive to appear to be the type of person called for by each situation in which they find themselves. These individuals are particularly sensitive and responsive to social and interpersonal cues to situational appropriateness. Their social behavior displays pronounced situation-to-situation specificity. At the same time, correspondence between their behavior and underlying attitudes often is minimal. These individuals are known as