Direct and indirect self-promotion in the eyes of the perceivers

Indirect Ingratiation: Pleasing People by Associating Them with Successful Others and by Praising Their Associates

“…As demonstrated previously by Aronson and Linder (1965), the gut‐feeling measure was more sensitive to manipulation than the measurement of the traits. Moreover, the lack of difference in the ability measure between the indirect self‐promotion condition and the control group is in line with previous research, which showed that indirect self‐promotion does pay off in terms of perceived ability (e.g., Tal‐Or, in press). The targets might not believe people's bragging about their close others' success because they acknowledge the benefit these people reap from such an association.…”

“…Arguably, the perceivers assume that the positive description of others stems from the speaker's likability (e.g., Wyer, Budesheim, & Lambert, 1990). On the other hand, when the described other is close to the speaker, the speaker is perceived rather negatively in terms of manipulability and sociability (e.g., Tal‐Or, 2008, in press). These two conflicting perceptions should cancel each other out.…”

“…However, this is not the case when people initiate the delivery of the information regarding this association. Previous research has shown that people suspect the ulterior motives of those who use indirect self‐promotion (Tal‐Or, 2008) and that using these tactics usually does not pay off in terms of perceived ability (Lebherz et al, 2009; Tal‐Or, in press). While indirect self‐promotion is not expected to result in enhanced perceptions of the impression manager's ability, indirect ingratiation in which there is no connection between the successful other and the impression manager is even less likely to improve perceptions about the latter's ability.…”

Unpacking reputational power: Intended and unintended determinants of the assessment of actors’ power

“…We suggest that such unintended determinants of power attribution may be the result of either deliberate self-promotion (Pfeffer et al, 2006;Tal-Or, 2010) or a perception bias (Kitts, 2003;Leach and Sabatier, 2005). On the one hand, informants may intentionally overstate the power of fellows with whom they share some similarities or with whom they closely collaborate, in order to indirectly promote themselves.…”

Children's judgements of positive claims people make about themselves

“…Future research will be needed to address how our findings might extend to forms of social promotion that do not involve talking about oneself, such as intentionally displaying one's possessions in ways that prompt people to ask about them (Gauvain, Altman, & Fahim, 1984) or acting in ways that signal one's positive moral qualities (Shaw et al, 2014). Further research is also needed to examine whether children reason in similar ways about indirect self‐promotion, in which children connect themselves to successful others (Tal‐Or, 2010). Notably, in the present study, one of our scenarios can be considered a form of indirect self‐promotion because the character is calling attention to the accomplishments of his or her father.…”