You Call It “Self-Exuberance”; I Call It “Bragging”

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-Promotion 2 ! ! ! ABSTRACT People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a tradeoff between conveying one's positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this tradeoff wrong because they erroneously project their own feelings onto their interaction partners. As a consequence, people overestimate the extent to which recipients of their self-promotion will feel proud of and happy for them, and underestimate the extent to which recipients will feel annoyed (Experiment 1 and 2). Permanent repository linkBecause people tend to self-promote excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of the self-promotion to view the self-promoter as less likeable and as a braggart (Experiment 3). Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-Promotion 3 ! ! !People want others to hold favorable images of them (Baumeister, 1982;Frey, 1978;Goffman, 1967;Jones & Wortman, 1973;Leary & Kowalski, 1990;Schlenker, Weigold, & Hallam, 1990;Sedikides, 1993), and often engage in self-promotion to achieve this end, for example by enumerating their strengths and positive traits, highlighting their accomplishments, and making internal attributions for success and achievements (Jones & Pittman, 1982;Rudman, 1998). Self-promotion can, however, backfire (Godfrey, Jones, & Lord,1986). Favorable impressions may be better accomplished by modest self-presentation, or even self-denigration, than by outright bragging about one's positive qualities (Ben-Ze'ev, 1993;Feather, 1993;Powers & Zuroff, 1988;Schlenker, 1980;Schlenker & Leary, 1982;Stires & Jones, 1969;Tice, 1991;Tice & Baumeister, 1990;Tice, Butler, Muraven, & Stillwell, 1995;Wosinska, Dabul, Whetstone-Dion, & Cialdini, 1996).People are not oblivious to the negative consequences of excessive self-promotion, especially when anticipating public evaluation (Baumeister, 1982;Schlenker, 1975) or interacting with friends (Tice et al., 1995). Yet, self-promotion is a commonly used impressionmanagement strategy (cf., Leary et al., 1994), and most of us have at times been on the receiving end of others' out-of-control self-praise. Why do so many people so often seem to get the tradeoff between self-promotion and modesty wrong, ultimately (metaphorically) shooting themselves in the foot? We propose that excessive self-promotion results from limitations in people's emotional perspective taking when they are trying to instill a positive image in others.Emotional perspective taking requires predicting how somebody else would emotionally respond to a situation that is different from the situation that the perspective-taker is currently Failures of emotional perspective taking can result from systematic errors in either judgment. First, people have ...

A qualitative analysis of the information science needs of public health researchers in an academic setting

“…The efficacy of self-promotional acts can be controversial. In organizational psychology, studies have found that self-promotion is effective in creating perceptions of competence, but overt acts of self-promotion make an individual appear arrogant [ 55 – 57 ]. Beyond navigating this balance between projecting confidence and arrogance, when researchers’ self-promotion is disconnected from science communication, it may be seen as being at odds with the research endeavor [ 58 ].…”

Thanking, apologizing, bragging, and blaming: Responsibility exchange theory and the currency of communication.

“…Claiming credit for accomplishments makes credit-claimers appear more successful and intelligent (L. C. Miller, Cooke, Tsang, & Morgan, 1992;Vonk, 1999) and increases perceived task aptitude and "hireability" (Rudman, 1998;Stevens & Kristof, 1995). Because of this, people often engage in the strategy of claiming credit (i.e., self-promotion) over other strategies when they aim to project an image of competence (Muller & Butera, 2004;Stevens & Kristof, 1995), although there is evidence that they may be miscalibrated about others' reactions to such strategies (Scopelliti, Loewenstein, & Vosgerau, 2015). Similarly, avoiding blame by providing excuses, or by blaming external circumstances, can help preserve the appearance of competence (Crant & Bateman, 1993) and integrity (Kim et al, 2004(Kim et al, , 2006, and can even make a person seem less deserving of punishment (Wood & Mitchell, 1981).…”

“…There is also evidence for the opposite side of the tradeoff: Research has documented a negative impact of bragging and blaming on perceived warmth. Though most research on bragging does not involve a victim from whom the credit is taken away, observers tend to see braggarts as less likable, less social sensitive, and less socially attractive (L. C. Miller et al, 1992;Scopelliti et al, 2015;Vonk, 1999), and it seems logical that negative character attributions would be even worse in cases in which the benefit to self comes at another's expense. Similarly, blaming makes a person seem less likable, modest, and appealing to work with (Forsyth, Berger, & Mitchell, 1981;Forsyth & Mitchell, 1979;F.…”

Impression (Mis) Management When Communicating Success

“…One possibility is that people accurately anticipate when to emphasize effort and when to emphasize talent in order to make a positive impression on their audience. However, people often choose suboptimal impression management strategies because they mispredict their audience's reactions to their self-presentation (Scopelliti, Vosgerau, & Loewenstein, 2015;Sezer, Gino, & Norton, 2018;Steinmetz, Sezer, & Sedikides, 2017). Thus, I expect that people fail to accurately predict which attribution receives favor from their audience.…”

“…Research has shown that people evaluate themselves primarily based on their agency/competence-related qualities (Wojciszke & Abele, 2008). When trying to gauge what the audience would like to hear, people might project these competence-based evaluations onto others (Scopelliti et al, 2015), and might thus broadcast their talent, as was found in the self-promotion literature (Bolino & Turnley, 1999). In contrast, people evaluate others primarily based on communion/warmth-related qualities (Cuddy et al, 2008;Wojciszke & Abele, 2008) and generally prefer those who seem warm (Cottrell, Neuberg, & Li, 2007).…”