Are You a Social Chameleon?
Whether you are the same person in every room - and whether that is the compliment it sounds like
Some people walk into a room, read it in seconds and become whatever it needs. Others are the same in every room and could not do otherwise if they tried. Psychology has measured this since 1974 under the name self-monitoring, and its most useful finding is that neither end is the good one. The chameleons are better at first impressions, negotiation and jobs that need a face; the consistent are better at long friendships and at knowing what they actually think. Each is baffled by the other.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Fifteen questions about how you behave around other people. Answer as you are, not as you would like to be seen - which, for some of you, is itself the question.
What it measures
Three components of self-monitoring: how well you read a room, how much you adjust to it, and how consistent you are from one setting to the next. High on the first two and low on the third is the chameleon; the reverse is the person who is the same everywhere.
Based on: Self-Monitoring Scale (Snyder, 1974)
Possible results
Reading the room
Picking up what a situation and its people expect.
Adapting
Changing how you come across to fit.
Consistency
Being recognisably the same from one setting to the next.
Common questions
Is being a chameleon the same as being fake?
No, and the research is careful about it. Being fake is saying what you do not believe for advantage; self-monitoring is adjusting tone, warmth and volume to what a situation calls for, which most people would call manners if they did it less well. The chameleon's adjustments are mostly automatic and mostly kind. Where it becomes a problem is not in the rooms but between them - when so much has been adjusted that there is no unadjusted version left to consult. That is rare, and it is fixable by keeping some company in which you do not perform.
How is this different from the first-impressions and self-other tests?
The first-impressions test asks what people see when you walk in; this one asks whether you are steering it. The self-other test asks whether your view of yourself matches other people's; this one asks whether there is one self for them to see or several. They overlap at the edges - a chameleon will often score well on first impressions and puzzlingly on self-other, because different people are seeing different versions - and taken together they describe the whole loop: what you show, whether you chose to, and whether it matches.
Sources
- Snyder, M. (1974). Self-monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
An honest note The original scale measures self-monitoring as one dimension, and its author later argued it identifies two kinds of people rather than a continuum. Later factor analyses found it splits into components - the ability to modify self-presentation, sensitivity to others' expressions, and other-directedness - and the three bars here follow that reading rather than the single score. The scale has been criticised on exactly this point, so treat the three as a description rather than a measurement. Two things about the interpretation. High self-monitoring is not manipulation and low is not honesty: the chameleon usually adjusts without deciding to, and the consistent person is sometimes just unable to read what the room wanted. And the finding that high self-monitors report less certainty about their own attitudes is real but modest, and describes a tendency rather than a fate.
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