Growing interest in self-presentation has spawned several examinations of individual differences in the tendency to manage one's impressions, notably Snyder's attempt to identify skilled impression managers through self-monitoring and an associated monitoring device, the Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS). To further examine the SMS, factor analyses were conducted and revealed a factor that could be interpreted as tapping social anxiety. This factor caused persons identified as high or low self-monitors on the basis of extreme score selection criteria to be low and high, respectively, in social anxiety. Four experiments demonstrated that social anxiety may account for low self-monitors' self presentational behaviors in highly socially evaluative situations. These findings indicate that the confounding of self-monitoring and social anxiety in the SMS may lead to ambiguous interpretations of research findings. (Author/JAC)