In this first study, participants were provided with a short fragment, supposedly derived from a group discussion, in which someone publicly characterized the self or the intimate partner in enhancing or deprecating terms. It was predicted that it would be seen as more socially appropriate and desirable to describe one's own intimate partner in an enhancing fashion than to describe oneself (as a relationship partner) as positive and as superior to others. Accordingly, it was assumed that a partner-deprecating evaluation will be rated as more socially inappropriate and undesirable than a self-denigrating evaluation.

Since there has been very little research on how people actually respond to enhancing self-presentations, as Schlenker and Leary (1982) have already indicated, the current study explored recipients' attributions for the discussant's statements about the self or the intimate partner. It was assumed that one can make at least two attributions when a person discloses enhancing or deprecating characterizations of the self or the intimate partner.

Firstly, self-enhancement attributions will be made when the evaluation is seen as the result of the discussant's motivation to feel good about the self (e.g., Taylor amp;& Brown, 1988, 1994) and the discussant's concern to manage the impression that she or he makes on others and embellishing the self in order to receive social approval and acceptance (e.g., Baumeister, 1982). Secondly, compliance attribution will be made when individuals believe that the discussant is induced to advocate publicly an opinion that conforms to the present social norms (e.g., Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959).

Not surprisingly, it was anticipated that enhancing evaluations would be attributed to a greater degree of self-enhancing and self-presentational motives than deprecating evaluations, and that this difference would be more pronounced when the discussant considered the self instead of the intimate partner. In contrast with the self-enhancing and the self-presentational motives, the compliance attribution would be more pronounced when the discussant described the intimate partner instead of the self, in such a way that describing the partner in an enhancing manner would be attributed to a greater degree of compliance than when the self is considered in an enhancing manner. Self-evaluations would lead to a less pronounced difference in compliance attribution.