How Self-Monitoring Shapes What We Buy
Some shoppers respond to what a product says about them and others to what it does. A 1974 scale of 25 statements is said to sort them, a 2018 book doubts the sorting, and no source behind this piece tested the two together.
Answer to the question
Why do some shoppers buy the image, not the product?
One account says it is a trait. High self-monitors, who adjust to the room, are reported to respond more to appeals about what a product says about them, and low self-monitors to claims about what it does. A rival account says everyone buys partly for an audience. No source behind this piece tested the two together.
Key takeaways
- Mark Snyder's 1974 self-monitoring scale has 25 true-or-false items and sorts people by whether they take their cue from the situation or from their own feelings.
- The reported pattern since Snyder and DeBono's 1985 paper is that high self-monitors respond more to image appeals and low self-monitors to quality claims. DeBono reviewed about twenty years of this work in 2006.
- The sources behind this piece report the direction of the 1985 effect and not its size, and no source found tested the trait account against the rival one.
- Simler and Hanson (2018) predict that imagery clusters on products that are easy to judge someone by, which makes the split one of products as well as of shoppers.
- A 2025 collaborative replication of Griskevicius and colleagues (2010), with 3,774 participants in 24 groups across six countries, found no evidence that a status story raised hypothetical green choices.
Mark Snyder's self-monitoring scale is a sheet of 25 true-or-false statements. "I would probably make a good actor" is one of them. "I find it hard to imitate the behavior of other people" is another, and it scores a point for a false answer. The total sorts people by whether they take their cues from the room or from their own feelings. Snyder published the scale in 1974. A decade later he and Kenneth DeBono used it to ask what shoppers want from an advertisement, and the question produced about twenty years of studies.
What the Scale Actually Measures
Snyder introduced the trait in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1974, in a paper called "Self-monitoring of expressive behavior". High self-monitors read what a situation calls for and adjust to it. Low self-monitors behave much the same across situations, because they take their cue from what they feel rather than from who is watching. One anchor sits outside the person and the other inside, and the rest of the argument depends on that split.
I would probably make a good actor.
Snyder's construct does not rank the two. A third item on the scale reads "I guess I put on a show to impress or entertain people." The scale has been argued over since it appeared. A revised 18-item form followed in the 1980s, and in 2000 Psychological Bulletin carried a review of the construct under the title "Self-monitoring: Appraisal and reappraisal". The score is also self-reported, which matters for a trait that is partly about how a person manages the impression they give.
Self-monitoring is treated as a stable difference between people. That stability is what lets a score from a questionnaire stand in for a reaction to an advertisement the person has not yet seen. It also makes self-monitoring a claim about the person and not about the moment, which is the claim the book in the third section disputes.
Which Advertisements Win Which Shoppers?
Snyder and DeBono's 1985 paper, "Appeals to image and claims about quality", set two kinds of advertisement against the two kinds of shopper. An image appeal says what owning the product says about you. A quality claim says what the product does. Daniel O'Keefe, summarising this work in 2010 and citing the 1985 paper, states the pattern: high self-monitors react more favourably to image-oriented advertisements than to quality-oriented ones, and the opposite holds for low self-monitors. DeBono reviewed about twenty years of such work in the Journal of Personality in 2006. The sources behind this piece report the direction of the effect and not its size.
DeBono and Snyder returned to the question in 1989, in a paper on the role of form and function in product evaluation. Those two words sit close to the same split: form is the image a product projects, and function is the work it does. If self-monitoring sorts shoppers, the sorting runs along that line.
O'Keefe's account of why the pattern should hold is a reading of the trait, not a separate finding. High self-monitors care about the image they give, so an appeal built on image should persuade them more than one built on product attributes they value less. The same logic runs the other way for low self-monitors. It is an explanation offered for the direction of the effect, and the sources read here do not test it.
The outcome these sources describe is a more favourable reaction to an advertisement, which is one step short of a purchase. Self-monitoring, so far, predicts the appeal a person favours and not what they carry home.
A Book That Doubts the Quality Answer
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's The Elephant in the Brain (2018) reads the same advertisements differently. In its chapter on consumption they argue that purchases signal to an audience, and that people spot this in other people's purchases far more readily than in their own (pp. 173 to 174). Lifestyle advertising, on their account, works partly by changing what a buyer's peers think of the brand (p. 181). They give Corona's "Find your beach" and the Marlboro Man as cases (pp. 179 to 180), and predict that the easier a product is to judge someone by, the more it is sold with cultural imagery (p. 183).
That prediction is about products, where the trait account is about shoppers. It says image appeals cluster on visible goods for everyone, not on certain buyers. The book also reads a quality answer with suspicion. People prefer to think their purchases are for themselves (p. 181), so a shopper who says the product is what matters is giving the answer the theory expects from anyone.
The chapter's headline experiment is the 2010 study by Vladas Griskevicius and colleagues, in which status motives pushed people towards green products when they shopped in public and not in private (p. 171). A collaborative registered replication, published in Collabra: Psychology in 2025 by 33 authors, ran a status-motive story across 24 student groups in six countries with 3,774 participants. It found no evidence that the story raised hypothetical pro-environmental choices. Its abstract does not mention the public and private shopping contrast. The authors of the book say they expect readers to accept about seventy per cent of what they argue (p. 107).
Where the Two Accounts Would Split
On a questionnaire the two accounts agree. A low self-monitor who says quality decides the purchase fits the trait account, and fits the book as well, since the book expects people to say it. A high self-monitor who says image decides it fits the trait account equally well, and fits the book too, since the book expects image to matter. They part company at the till. The trait account predicts that, for the same visible product, a high self-monitor's choice follows the image and a low self-monitor's follows the function. The book predicts that moving the same purchase from view to out of view changes the choice for everyone, whatever the score.
The two accounts differ in one respect only. In the trait account the score does the work and the setting does none. In the book's account the setting does the work and the score does none. Each half of that test already exists, and these predictions are a reading of the two accounts, not a result. Snyder and DeBono varied the shopper, and Griskevicius and colleagues varied the setting. The sources behind this piece do not combine the two.
The scale predicts which reason a shopper will give and the book doubts that reason, so a purchase made once in view and once out of view is the only thing that could say which of them has the cause right.
Common questions
Why do some shoppers buy the image, not the product?
One account is a trait, self-monitoring. High self-monitors, who adjust to the room, respond more to appeals about what a product says about them, and low self-monitors respond more to claims about what it does. A rival account holds that everyone buys partly for an audience. Which account explains more is still open, because we found no study that pits them against each other.
What is self-monitoring in psychology?
Self-monitoring is a trait Mark Snyder introduced in 1974. It describes how far a person adjusts their behaviour to fit a situation, measured by a 25-item true-or-false scale. High scorers take their cue from the setting and low scorers from their own feelings.
Do image advertisements work better on high self-monitors?
The reported direction is yes, and the sources read here give no effect size. The 1985 paper itself could not be opened.
Sources
Snyder, M. (1974). 'Self-monitoring of expressive behavior.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 526-537. doi:10.1037/h0037039. Citation confirmed from the Crossref record; the paper itself was not read.
Snyder, M., & Gangestad, S. (1986). 'On the nature of self-monitoring: Matters of assessment, matters of validity.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(1), 125-139. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.51.1.125. Citation confirmed from the Crossref record; the 18-item form is reported by a secondary description of the scale.
Snyder, M., & DeBono, K. G. (1985). 'Appeals to image and claims about quality: Understanding the psychology of advertising.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 586-597. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.49.3.586.
DeBono, K. G., & Snyder, M. (1989). 'Understanding consumer decision-making processes: The role of form and function in product evaluation.' Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 19(5), 416-424. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1989.tb00064.x. Citation confirmed from the Crossref record; the paper was not read.
DeBono, K. G. (2006). 'Self-monitoring and consumer psychology.' Journal of Personality, 74(3), 715-738. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2006.00390.x.
Gangestad, S. W., & Snyder, M. (2000). 'Self-monitoring: Appraisal and reappraisal.' Psychological Bulletin, 126(4), 530-555. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.126.4.530. Title and citation confirmed from the Crossref record; the abstract could not be opened.
O’Keefe, D. J. (2010). 'The argumentative structure of some persuasive appeal variations.' ISSA Proceedings 2010, Rozenberg Quarterly. https://rozenbergquarterly.com/issa-proceedings-2010-the-argumentative-structure-of-some-persuasive-appeal-variations/
Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2018). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press. Chapter 10, Consumption, pp. 169 to 185, and p. 107, cited from the vault's audited book notes.
Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J. M., & Van den Bergh, B. (2010). 'Going green to be seen: Status, reputation, and conspicuous conservation.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(3), 392-404. doi:10.1037/a0017346. Read at the level of the repository abstract.
Lazarevic, L. B., and colleagues (2025). 'Collaborative registered replication of Griskevicius et al. (2010): Can pro-environmental behavior be promoted by priming status motivation?' Collabra: Psychology. doi:10.1525/collabra.143773.