Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS-R)

Abstract

The Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS-R), developed by Richard D. Lennox and Raymond N. Wolfe in 1984, represents a pivotal psychometric refinement of Mark Snyder’s foundational Self-Monitoring Scale introduced in 1974. Following substantial methodological critiques that demonstrated the multidimensional heterogeneity and confounding personality variance of Snyder’s original 25-item true/false instrument, Lennox and Wolfe reconceptualized the self-monitoring construct. They refined its operational definition, stripping away confounding traits such as extraversion, acting style, and social anxiety to focus exclusively on two core behavioral competencies: the cognitive-perceptual capacity to decode interpersonal cues and the behavioral dexterity to alter expressive presentation.

The resulting 13-item instrument measures self-monitoring across two distinct yet complementary subscales: Ability to Modify Self-Presentation (7 items) and Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others (6 items). Respondents evaluate items using a 6-point continuous Likert-type response format ranging from 0 (“Certainly, always false”) to 5 (“Certainly, always true”). Psychometric evaluations yield robust internal consistency coefficients, with Lennox and Wolfe reporting a full-scale Cronbach’s alpha of α = .75, while the Ability subscale demonstrates α = .77 and the Sensitivity subscale achieves α = .70 across normative collegiate cohorts.

Convergent and discriminant validity investigations reveal that the SMS-R correlates positively with individuation (r = .30) and private self-consciousness (r = .17), while successfully disengaging from the public anxiety and neuroticism artifacts that afflicted Snyder’s initial scale. As a structurally stable, continuous psychometric measurement tool, the SMS-R remains the instrument of choice across organizational psychology, marketing and consumer research, communication studies, and contemporary social psychology.

Keywords

Revised Self-Monitoring Scale, SMS-R, Richard D. Lennox, Raymond N. Wolfe, Mark Snyder, self-monitoring, impression management, expressive behavior, behavioral flexibility, social cue sensitivity, psychometrics, factor analysis, interpersonal perception

Authors

The Revised Self-Monitoring Scale was developed and validated by Richard D. Lennox and Raymond N. Wolfe. At the time of the instrument’s development and publication in 1984, both researchers were affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Geneseo (Geneseo, New York, United States).

Raymond N. Wolfe, Ph.D., served as a prominent professor of psychology at SUNY Geneseo, specializing in personality structure, social psychology, and individual differences in interpersonal behavior. Richard D. Lennox, Ph.D., contributed extensively to psychometric modeling, quantitative methodology, and advanced latent variable structural modeling, later continuing his career in applied statistical analytics, behavioral health measurement, and epidemiological research.

Inquiries regarding the theoretical conceptualization and historical development of the scale correspond to the foundational literature published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology through the American Psychological Association (APA).

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS-R) is to provide an empirically purified, psychometrically rigorous measurement of an individual’s capacity and tendency to monitor, regulate, and calibrate expressive self-presentation during social interaction. When Mark Snyder introduced the self-monitoring paradigm in 1974, he postulated that individuals differ systematically in the extent to which they rely on situational and interpersonal cues versus internal affective states and personal dispositions to guide their verbal and nonverbal behavior. However, Snyder’s operationalization incorporated a broad, heterogeneous constellation of traits, mingling interpersonal acuity and strategic adaptability with theatrical acting preference, sociability, and social compliance.

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, psychometricians demonstrated that Snyder’s original scale suffered from structural instability, low internal consistency across sub-components, and severe construct contamination. Critical psychometric evaluations demonstrated that Snyder’s instrument conflated genuine social competence with neurotic social anxiety, other-directed conformity, and standard extraversion. Lennox and Wolfe responded directly to these limitations by constructing the SMS-R. Their theoretical rationale was rooted in a necessary distinction: self-monitoring should not be operationalized as an amalgamation of behavioral intentions, conformity, and theatrical interests, but rather as an interrelated set of cognitive and behavioral abilities.

The SMS-R was engineered to fulfill several essential research and applied objectives:

• Purification of the Latent Construct: Isolating the two core theoretical prerequisites of effective self-monitoring: first, the perceptual sensitivity required to detect and interpret the subtle expressive cues of interaction partners; and second, the behavioral flexibility required to tailor one’s own self-presentation in response to those cues.
• Replacement of Dichotomous Scoring: Transitioning from Snyder’s forced-choice True/False format to a 6-point continuous response continuum (0 to 5), thereby expanding measurement variance, increasing reliability, and permitting more sophisticated multivariate analyses.
• Elimination of Methodological Artifacts: Removing items that loaded onto unrelated constructs such as neurotic public apprehension, low self-esteem, or generic gregariousness.
• Broad Application in Applied Disciplines: Equipping organizational researchers, consumer behaviorists, and communication specialists with a clean instrument capable of predicting negotiation outcomes, leadership emergence, sales efficacy, consumer product adoption, and adaptive communication styles without confounding the findings with extraversion.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct of self-monitoring addresses how individuals manage social interaction through expressive control and social perceptual acuity. In the Lennox and Wolfe paradigm, self-monitoring is conceptualized as an executive interpersonal competency. Rather than reflecting an insecure desire to please others or an artistic passion for acting, self-monitoring represents the functional synergy between environmental social decoding and active self-regulation. The SMS-R operationalizes this construct across two distinct dimensions.

1. Ability to Modify Self-Presentation (7 Items)

The Ability to Modify Self-Presentation subscale assesses behavioral adaptability, self-presentation control, and the fluid capacity to alter one’s expressive outward demeanor to meet the evolving demands of an interpersonal encounter. This dimension reflects an individual’s repertoire of expressive behaviors and the self-efficacy required to deploy them intentionally. High scorers on this subscale perceive themselves as versatile communicators who can control facial expressions, vocal tone, body language, and verbal framing to produce a desired impression.

For example, a high-ability individual who observes that an audience is disengaged or that a conversation partner is becoming defensive can immediately pivot their communicative register, modulating warmth, authority, or posture to alter the trajectory of the interaction. Conversely, low scorers experience behavioral rigidity; they feel unable or unwilling to modify their behavior, expressing frustration when placed in novel social environments that demand unfamiliar roles. Notably, this dimension includes negatively keyed items designed to capture subjective difficulty in behavioral imitation and situational adaptation.

2. Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others (6 Items)

The Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others subscale captures nonverbal decoding accuracy, perceptual empathy, and interpersonal vigilance. Effective self-presentation cannot occur in a vacuum; it requires continuous environmental monitoring to gather feedback regarding how one’s performance is being received. This subscale measures an individual’s self-reported aptitude for reading subtle, nonverbal emotional leakage, micro-expressions, shifts in vocal inflection, and deceptive cues displayed by others.

Individuals scoring high on this dimension report an acute awareness of unspoken interpersonal dynamics. They notice instantly when a smile is insincere, when a listener is bored despite nodding politely, or when an underlying tension exists within a group. This perceptual acuity provides the raw data that informs the individual’s self-presentation adjustments. Without high sensitivity, behavioral flexibility operates blindly; without behavioral flexibility, high sensitivity results in passive, unexpressed social awareness.

Construct Demarcation and Discriminant Boundaries

To fully understand the construct measured by the SMS-R, it is vital to contrast it with related social cognitive constructs:

• Private vs. Public Self-Consciousness: As measured by Fenigstein, Scheier, and Buss (1975), public self-consciousness reflects an anxious, ruminative awareness of oneself as a social object, whereas the SMS-R captures active, proactive behavioral mastery and perceptual sensitivity rather than paralyzing self-scrutiny.
• Individuation: The construct of individuation (Maslach et al., 1985) involves an individual’s willingness to publicly stand out and engage in distinctive behaviors. The SMS-R correlates positively with individuation (r = .30), confirming that high self-monitors are not mere conformists; they possess the social confidence and tactical skill to command attention when appropriate.
• Machiavellianism: Although both constructs involve strategic interpersonal behavior, Machiavellianism entails cynical, manipulative, and exploitative motives, whereas self-monitoring as measured by the SMS-R is value-neutral, representing functional cognitive and behavioral communication competence.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical foundations of the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale synthesize classic sociological perspectives, symbolic interactionism, social-cognitive cybernetics, and interpersonal communication theory.

Dramaturgical Sociology and Symbolic Interactionism

The sociological underpinning of self-monitoring traces directly to Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical framework articulated in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Goffman posited that human social life is fundamentally theatrical: individuals operate as social actors on front-stage and back-stage arenas, managing expressive cues to foster specific social definitions and sustain viable identities. Complementing Goffman, George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism emphasized the cognitive process of “taking the role of the other,” wherein social actors mentally adopt the perspectives of interaction partners to anticipate reactions and coordinate joint action.

Lennox and Wolfe integrated these sociological insights into a psychometrically coherent cognitive-behavioral framework. Where Goffman described the macro-level theatrical dynamics of social institutions, Lennox and Wolfe operationalized the micro-level individual differences in psychological machinery that allow an actor to execute dramaturgical adjustments effectively.

The Cybernetic Feedback Loop of Social Self-Regulation

From a cognitive psychology perspective, the SMS-R aligns seamlessly with cybernetic models of self-regulation, such as those formulated by Charles Carver and Michael Scheier. In cybernetic theory, adaptive behavioral regulation requires a closed-loop feedback mechanism comprising:

1. Sensor / Input Comparator: Continuous environmental scanning that captures interpersonal feedback and compares current performance against social standards or personal impression goals. In the SMS-R, this function is embodied by the Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others dimension.
2. Effector / Behavioral Controller: The behavioral mechanism that executes corrective adjustments to close the discrepancy between the observed social response and the desired social outcome. In the SMS-R, this function is represented by the Ability to Modify Self-Presentation dimension.

By conceptualizing self-monitoring through this cybernetic lens, Lennox and Wolfe resolved the theoretical ambiguities that plagued earlier iterations of the construct. Rather than framing self-monitoring as a moralistic contrast between authentic individuals and chameleon-like manipulators, the SMS-R frames it as an integrated social cybernetic skill set indispensable for successful human communication.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale has been confirmed through extensive construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related investigations across diverse research programs.

Construct and Structural Validity

Lennox and Wolfe (1984) developed the SMS-R by conducting rigorous item analyses on an initial pool of candidate items administered alongside Snyder’s original scale and related personality markers. Factor analytic procedures demonstrated that the SMS-R successfully purged the secondary, irrelevant dimensions that plagued Snyder’s scale. In confirmatory studies, the two-factor model demonstrated superior structural stability across both male and female samples, demonstrating invariant factor loadings and establishing that the latent dimensions operate symmetrically across gender groups.

Convergent Validity Evidence

Convergent validity has been established by correlating the SMS-R with established psychological inventories measuring communicative competence, perspective taking, and social functioning:

• Individuation: The total SMS-R correlates moderately and positively with the Individuation Scale (r = .30, p < .001), indicating that self-monitors are active, differentiated participants in social exchanges rather than timid, passive observers.
• Private Self-Consciousness: The scale displays a modest positive correlation with private self-consciousness (r = .17, p < .01), demonstrating that attention to external expressive behavior is paired with cognitive reflection regarding one’s internal behavioral states.
• Perspective Taking and Empathy: The Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others subscale correlates significantly with Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) perspective-taking subscale (r values typically ranging from .32 to .41), underscoring its alignment with cognitive empathy and social decoding acuity.
• Social Flexibility and Social Self-Efficacy: The Ability to Modify Self-Presentation subscale correlates strongly with measures of social assertiveness, communication competence, and behavioral repertoire flexibility (coefficients ranging between .45 and .58).

Discriminant Validity Evidence

One of the primary achievements of the SMS-R was establishing discriminant validity where the original Snyder scale failed:

• Independence from Social Anxiety and Neuroticism: Factorial critiques of Snyder’s scale (e.g., Briggs, Cheek, & Buss, 1980) demonstrated that its “Other-Directedness” factor correlated positively with social anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, and low self-esteem. Lennox and Wolfe demonstrated that neither the SMS-R total score nor its subscales correlate significantly with social anxiety or neuroticism (r values typically between −.04 and .08, non-significant), confirming that the SMS-R measures interpersonal competence rather than anxious social distress.
• Low Social Desirability Confound: Correlations between the SMS-R and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale remain negligible to weak (typically r < .12), demonstrating that respondents do not merely endorse items to project favorable moral virtue.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The SMS-R has repeatedly proven predictive utility across real-world organizational and consumer settings. In sales and marketing research, scores on the Ability to Modify Self-Presentation subscale significantly predict adaptive selling behavior, boundary-spanning efficacy, and negotiated settlement outcomes. In consumer behavior literature (e.g., O’Cass, 2000), high scorers exhibit greater responsiveness to image-based advertising appeals and demonstrate strategic status-signaling in brand selection compared to low scorers.

Reliability

The internal consistency and temporal stability of the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale have been validated across collegiate, organizational, and cross-cultural populations.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In their original validation sample (N = 266 undergraduate students), Lennox and Wolfe (1984) established the internal consistency of the scale using Cronbach’s alpha:

• Total Scale (13 items): α = .75
• Ability to Modify Self-Presentation (7 items): α = .77
• Sensitivity to Expressive Behavior of Others (6 items): α = .70

Subsequent psychometric investigations have affirmed these values. For instance, in consumer behavior studies examining large adult samples, O’Cass (2000) reported internal consistency coefficients of .78 for the Ability subscale, .72 for the Sensitivity subscale, and .77 for the full instrument. Meta-analytic evaluations of self-monitoring scales (e.g., Day, Schleicher, Unckless, & Hiller, 2002) have confirmed that the SMS-R routinely exhibits more coherent internal structure than Snyder’s original scale, which historically suffered from attenuated alpha coefficients due to dichotomous scoring and multidimensional item variance.

Test-Retest Temporal Stability

Test-retest stability coefficients computed across intervals ranging from two to eight weeks demonstrate that the SMS-R captures stable trait-like individual differences. Lennox and Wolfe reported a four-week test-retest correlation coefficient of r = .81 for the full scale, with subscale stabilities of r = .83 for Ability and r = .76 for Sensitivity. Longer-term follow-ups across academic semesters have demonstrated stability coefficients consistently exceeding .72, establishing that while the behavioral manifestation of self-monitoring is dynamically responsive to immediate situational contexts, the underlying cognitive and behavioral capacity represents an enduring individual difference.

Factor Analysis

The structural purity of the SMS-R stands as its definitive psychometric advantage over preceding measures. Lennox and Wolfe’s development process was driven by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic approaches designed to resolve the historical controversy regarding the factor structure of self-monitoring.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Lennox and Wolfe (1984) subjected candidate items to principal axes factor extraction followed by oblique rotation (promax), recognizing that while behavioral flexibility and perceptual sensitivity are theoretically distinct, they should correlate moderately in functioning social actors. The EFA clearly extracted two primary, correlated factors (inter-factor correlation ranging between r = .35 and r = .42 across subsamples):

• Factor 1 (Ability to Modify Self-Presentation): Accounted for the largest proportion of common variance, with primary item factor loadings ranging from .52 to .78. Cross-loadings onto the second factor were consistently low (all ≤ .20).
• Factor 2 (Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others): Extracted cleanly as the second factor, with item factor loadings ranging from .48 to .74, with negligible cross-loadings onto the first factor.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Goodness of Fit

Contemporary psychometric evaluations employing Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) have tested the structural integrity of the 13-item two-factor oblique model against alternative structural configurations, including a unidimensional 13-item model and orthogonal two-factor models.

CFA studies report superior model fit for the correlated two-factor model across multiple standard fit metrics:

• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Values consistently fall between .042 and .058, well below the conservative .06 threshold for superior model fit.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values routinely exceed .93 to .96, indicating strong relative fit compared to the null baseline.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Coefficients regularly surpass .92.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values remain below .05, verifying minimal residual covariance among item pairs.

Alternative single-factor models exhibit poor fit (CFI < .80, RMSEA > .10), confirming that the construct cannot be treated as a purely monolithic latent trait at the item level. Instead, researchers are encouraged to model self-monitoring either as two correlated first-order factors or as a higher-order latent factor comprising the two validated sub-dimensions.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational characteristics and structural specifications of the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale are summarized below:

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric personality questionnaire; continuous rating scale measuring social cognitive and behavioral impression management competence.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically aged 16 and older); extensively validated across university, organizational, consumer, and general community populations.
• Item Inventory Count: 13 items total, divided into two distinct subscales:
  • Ability to Modify Self-Presentation: 7 items (Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7).
  • Sensitivity to the Expressive Behavior of Others: 6 items (Items 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13).
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert-type continuous response format scored as follows:
  • 0 = Certainly, always false
  • 1 = Generally false
  • 2 = Somewhat false, but with exceptions
  • 3 = Somewhat true, but with exceptions
  • 4 = Generally true
  • 5 = Certainly, always true
• Scoring and Transformation Protocol:
  • Reverse Scoring: Items 4 and 6 on the Ability to Modify Self-Presentation subscale are negatively keyed and must be reversed prior to computing scale scores: 0 → 5, 1 → 4, 2 → 3, 3 → 2, 4 → 1, 5 → 0. All other items (Items 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) are scored directly.
  • Subscale Scores: Computed by summing the respective item values. The Ability subscale ranges from 0 to 35; the Sensitivity subscale ranges from 0 to 30. Alternatively, mean item scores (ranging from 0 to 5) can be derived for cross-scale comparison.
  • Total Scale Score: Computed by summing all 13 items following reverse-scoring, yielding a continuous total score ranging from 0 to 65.
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes to complete.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Revised Self-Monitoring Scale was originally published in 1984 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal owned and published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The formal publication citation is:

Lennox, R. D., & Wolfe, R. N. (1984). Revision of the self-monitoring scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(6), 1349–1364.

Licensing and Usage Permissions:

• Non-Commercial Academic Research: Under standard scholarly fair-use conventions, the 13 questionnaire items and structural scoring keys published directly within academic journal articles may be reproduced, administered, and utilized for non-profit scientific investigation, collegiate teaching, and dissertational research without formal licensing fees, provided that appropriate attribution is given to Lennox and Wolfe (1984) and the APA.
• Commercial and Organizational Applications: Commercial deployments, incorporation into proprietary digital assessment platforms, test publishing, or for-profit executive consulting packages require formal permission and potential licensing clearance through the American Psychological Association’s Rights & Permissions office via the Copyright Clearance Center (RightsLink).

References

• Briggs, S. R., Cheek, J. M., & Buss, A. H. (1980). An analysis of the Self-Monitoring Scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(4), 679–686. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.38.4.679
• Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1981). Attention and self-regulation: A control-theory approach to human behavior. Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5887-2
• Day, D. V., Schleicher, D. J., Unckless, A. L., & Hiller, N. J. (2002). Self-monitoring personality at work: A meta-analytic investigation of construct validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 390–401. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.2.390
• Fenigstein, A., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43(4), 522–527. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076760
• Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
• Lennox, R. D., & Wolfe, R. N. (1984). Revision of the self-monitoring scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(6), 1349–1364. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.6.1349
• Maslach, C., Stapp, J., & Santee, R. T. (1985). Individuation: Conceptual analysis and assessment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 729–738. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.3.729
• O’Cass, A. (2000). A psychometric evaluation of a revised version of the Lennox and Wolfe Self-Monitoring Scale. Psychology & Marketing, 17(5), 397–420. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037039

Items of the Scale