Social Anxiety, Evolution, and Self-Presentation

An old but radical idea in social psychology is that the “person” is not a passive product—of environmental conditioning or genetic abnormality or biochemical factors or unconscious psychic phenomena—but is an active creation of the individual him- or herself (Gergen, 1984). Any approach to understanding and studying social anxiety has to take a position on this issue, since it has a major influence on subsequent model building, research, and therapeutic developments. Clinical psychology and psychiatry have traditionally favored one or other versions of the former paradigm, that people are products of various forces, be it internal or external. However, variants of the latter idea (that people are agents of their own creation [Trower, 1984, 1987]) is now well established in social psychology and becoming an emergent paradigm in the clinical field. For example Heimberg, Dodge, & Becker (1987) list five models of social phobia, all of which are arguably of the latter rather than the former school. Following Goffman’s seminal dramaturgical model (Goffman, 1959), the explicit or implicit theme in these types of models is that individuals are the architects of their own self-presentations, are motivated to present themselves favorably, and social anxiety is a fear of negative evaluation of the self that is likely to follow from predicted failures in self-presentation performances.