You Call It "Self-Exuberance"; I Call It "Bragging": Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-Promotion. (June 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Scopelliti, Irene; Loewenstein, George; Vosgerau, Joachim
• Is Part Of: Psychological science. Volume 26:Number 6(2015:Jun.)
• Page Start: 903
• Page End: 914
• Publication Date: 2015-06
• Subjects: social interaction -- emotions -- interpersonal relationships -- judgment -- social behavior -- open data -- open materials; Psychology -- Periodicals; 150.5
• DOI: 10.1177/0956797615573516
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0956-7976

Abstract

People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a trade-off between conveying one's positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this trade-off 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 (Experiments 1 and 2). Because people tend to promote themselves excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of self-promotion to view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts (Experiment 3).