Social skills and self-monitoring processes

Abstract

Three types of interpersonal perception are distinguished: self-monitoring (SM), person perception and metaperception, and the relationship between SM and social skills was discussed. It was argued that SM is an important component of social skills, and that one should distinguish between perceptual sensitivity and behavioural flexibility in the SM process. The experiment set out to determine whether SM, as measured by Snyder (1974), discriminates between socially-skilled and unskilled subjects; whether it relates to other measures of social skills across different ages, sexes and racial groups; and whether it has a factor structure which corresponds to Snyder's ad-hoc factors. The Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS) was administered to over 200 subjects from seven groups who differed in terms of age, sex, culture and social adequacy, along with other self-report social-skill scales. It was found that there was a significant difference on the SMS between matched groups of socially-skilled and unskilled adults. There was a predicted significant negative correlation between SM and three measures of social skill, in three different populations. Further, factor analysis revealed the SMS to be multidimensional though the dimensions do not correspond to Snyder's original five factors. The results are discussed in terms of perceptual sensitivity and behavioural flexibility in social situations.