Disclosure and the ideology of sociolinguistic naturalism in first impressions

Abstract

When meeting someone new, speakers engage in impression management (Goffman, 1959), typically seeking positive self-presentation and avoiding negative self-presentation, or stigmatization (Goffman, 1963). For the purposes of this study, opening conversations between newly met business professionals and students at a networking event in Hong Kong were recorded. Subsequently, the conversations were transcribed and played back to the recorded participants, who were asked to comment on their own and others’ verbal performances. These metapragmatic comments constitute the core data. The comments repeatedly oscillated between two opposing descriptors of conversational styles: “open”, viewed positively, and “reserved”, viewed negatively. Openness was evoked by the following moves/acts: (a) sharing somewhat discrediting/stigmatizing self-disclosures; (b) explicit evaluative stances of situations or events as “good”/”bad”, “liked”/”disliked”; (c) offering rich narrative detail (Tannen, 1989); and (d) volunteering information of one’s own private or non-work interests. Reserve traits were the polar opposites of openness. In particular, reserve was negatively evaluated when it was perceived as a way of over-managing impressions for maximum positivity and minimum stigma with little or no personal self-disclosure. This disclosure of personal details and foibles is symptomatic of the tendency in contemporary discourse to blur the boundaries between personal and public selves (Van Dijck, 2013). In the businesslike setting of a networking event, a unified image of the personal and public and an unstudied, seemingly effortless self-presentation lead to a speaker being deemed 'open' and positively evaluated. Comments showed participants hold a linguistic ideology of 'sociolinguistic naturalism' (Woolard, 2016) where, in the first encounter, an ostensibly unfiltered or unmediated and cohesive self is valued and deemed authentic and trustworthy.