ABSTRACT
Jennie Jerome Churchill, the charming, bonviveur mother of Winston Churchill, once shared one of her insights into friendship: “Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light” (Churchill, 1916). Her advice is a sage reminder of the importance of social support in relationships, especially support that affirms and enhances the desired images of close others. Through private and public displays of appreciation, approval, respect, and encouragement, people cement their relationships and provide one another with an array of immediate and long-range benefits. Such support can benefit recipients by boosting their confidence, self-efficacy, and self-esteem; by creating positive moods or dispelling negative ones; by inspiring them to tackle and accomplish desirable new challenges; by enhancing or protecting their public image and reputation; and, ultimately, by making it easier for them to achieve their goals in business and social life. People often can provide as much or more help by regulating and controlling beneficial information about others as by delivering some tangible material or physical good. The strategic provision of social support may be one of the more important and frequently used types of interpersonal help that occur in daily life. In this article, we examine the strategic control of information as a way to benefit close others. The research aims to open the door to future integration of work on helping behavior, social support, and impression management.
