Manipulating Personal Salience: The Effects of Performance Expectations on Physical Positioning
Contestants playing the Minnesota Jeopardy game chose positions in a 3 × 3 seating arrangement in anticipation of the competition. More visible seats were selected when contestants expected to perform well than when they expected to perform poorly. Mediation analyses suggest that performance expectations affected the desire to be noticed, which, in turn, affected the salience of the seat that was assumed. The findings suggest that people manipulate their salience as a function of their performance expectations to influence the impressions of others. The study introduces an important and possibly ubiquitous self-presentation technique that has been largely neglected by the psychological literature.