You are not being fake. You are being human.

The experience of noticing that you are significantly different with different people — more hesitant with certain investors, more expansive with certain friends, more performative with certain audiences — is almost universally interpreted as a character inconsistency or an authenticity failure. The sociological research suggests a different interpretation: it is the normal operation of a social cognitive system that has been calibrated across thousands of interactions to produce contextually appropriate behaviour.

Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical framework, published in 1959 and one of the most cited works in all of social science, established the foundational architecture. All social interaction is performance — not in the pejorative sense, but in the descriptive sense that all self-presentation is shaped by the audience, the stage, and the social script in play. Every situation activates a different role, a different script, and a different set of impression management goals. The founder who is confident and visionary with investors, approachable and collaborative with the team, vulnerable and honest with a co-founder, and measured and empathetic with customers is not being inconsistent, they are reading the stage correctly and responding accordingly.

Goffman’s most important distinction is between the front stage — the performance calibrated for the present audience — and the backstage — the self that exists when no audience is present. The question the article needs to raise, and will, is which of these performances has a backstage. That question matters more than whether the variation itself exists.

Why certain people bring out specific versions of you

The second mechanism goes deeper than impression management. Susan Andersen and Serena Chen’s relational self research, published in Psychological Review in 2002, established that contextual self-variation is not only performed but genuinely felt. Different social contexts do not merely elicit different behaviours — they activate different self-representations with different associated emotions, memories, and behavioural tendencies.

The mechanism is transference. Every significant relationship — parent, mentor, adversary, early authority figure — creates a relational self that is stored as an associative memory network. When a new person activates features of an old significant relationship — a similar authority dynamic, a similar communication style, a similar emotional demand — the stored relational self is activated, along with its associated emotional responses and self-appraisals.

This explains a pattern many entrepreneurs notice without having a framework for it: a specific investor, board member, or advisor activates a version of the self that does not appear in any other professional relationship. Hesitancy, deference, people-pleasing, or defensive aggression in contexts where the entrepreneur is usually none of these things. The behaviour is not a response to the person in front of them per se. It is a response to the relational self that person has activated — the self stored from an earlier authority relationship they resemble.

As established in “Why your self-concept was built by other people“, the relational patterns installed in early significant relationships do not stay in the past. They travel forward in the people who trigger them. Identifying which authority relationships tend to activate which relational selves is among the most practically useful pieces of self-knowledge available to any entrepreneur who navigates complex stakeholder dynamics.

When variation becomes a problem

The research distinguishes between two qualitatively different experiences that can both look like contextual variation from the outside.

Behavioural flexibility: adapting style, tone, and emphasis across contexts while maintaining consistent values, consistent self-awareness, and a coherent continuous self-experience that persists across all the performances.

Self-fragmentation: such extreme variation between social selves that there is no coherent anchor self behind the performances — the person genuinely feels like a different person in different settings, without a stable “I” that is aware of and can reflect on the different presentations.

Kernis and Goldman’s authenticity research identifies the key marker: whether the person can maintain a stable, continuous self-experience that persists across contexts. A founder who presents differently across multiple stakeholder relationships but can reflect on all of those presentations from a consistent self-perspective is demonstrating adaptive flexibility. A founder who cannot maintain continuity between contexts — who loses track of which version is the actual one, or who has no experience of a backstage self — is experiencing something that warrants attention.

The practical test is specific. At the end of a day in which the founder was “on” for investors, team members, customers, and partners in different ways — can they identify a continuous experience of being themselves throughout all of it? Can they say, honestly: “I presented differently in each of those contexts, I was aware of doing so, and there is a consistent me behind all of those presentations”?

If yes, the variation is adaptive. If the question produces confusion, anxiety, or the realisation that there is no stable backstage — that is useful information. Not alarming, but useful. And worth taking to a psychologist rather than resolving through willpower, because the backstage self is not built by deciding to have one.

What to actually do

Two specific practices the research supports.

After a day of high-performance social contexts, take five deliberate minutes alone — no phone, no task, no next thing — and ask: what did I actually think and feel today, independent of what I communicated to each audience? The gap between the answer and what was communicated across the day is the measure of the front-stage/backstage distance. Noticing it consistently is the beginning of maintaining a coherent backstage self rather than losing it to the accumulated performances.

When a specific relationship consistently activates a version of you that feels inconsistent with who you are elsewhere, ask: who does this person remind me of? Not in terms of personality or appearance, but in terms of the dynamic — the emotional demand, the authority structure, the implicit expectation. The relational self that is being activated was built in response to something earlier. Identifying what is the first step toward responding to the actual person rather than the relational self they triggered.

A book worth reading alongside this

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman is the foundational text for the article’s primary mechanism and remains one of the most accessible and practically illuminating books in social science. Despite being published in 1959, it reads as a precise description of contemporary professional life — the managed impressions, the backstage recovery, the exhaustion of sustained front-stage performance. For any entrepreneur who wants to understand the architecture of their own contextual self-presentation, it is the most honest and most immediately recognisable starting point available.

Have questions about this article?

If any part of this article raised questions you want to explore further — a concept that needs more explanation, a mechanism you want to understand better, or how something applies to your specific situation — courbot.co is built for exactly that. It is courben.co’s AI assistant, designed around the psychology of entrepreneurship. Ask it anything from this article.

This article discusses psychological and sociological patterns documented in research on self-presentation and identity. It is not designed to identify, diagnose, or assess any psychological condition, and it is not a substitute for professional support. If the patterns described here are significantly affecting your relationships or wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist can provide personalised support that an article cannot. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing significant psychological distress, please consult a qualified mental health professional.

Sources: Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books. Andersen, S.M. & Chen, S. (2002), Psychological Review, 109(4), 619–645. Kernis, M.H. & Goldman, B.M. (2006), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 283–357.