Public Self-Consciousness

Twelve statements describe awareness of oneself as a social object: being concerned about the way one presents oneself, caring about what others think, being self-conscious about one's appearance, and usually being aware of how one looks. The scale concerns attention to the outward self.

Fenigstein, Scheier and Buss (1975) distinguished public self-consciousness, awareness of how one appears to others, from private self-consciousness, attention to one's inner states. Public self-consciousness has been associated with concern for social evaluation and sensitivity to rejection. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).

The ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe greater attention to how one appears to others; lower scores describe less concern with one's public image. Moderate awareness supports social adjustment; very high levels may accompany social anxiety.

The scale is used in research on self-presentation and social anxiety. On this site, the Private Self-Consciousness scale describes inward attention, the Self-Monitoring scale describes adjusting behavior to social cues, and the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (RSQ) measures anxious expectations of rejection.

Public self-consciousness — awareness of oneself as a social object — shows convergent validity with social anxiety, impression management, and responsiveness to social feedback (Fenigstein et al., 1975).

“Worry about what people think of me.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.