People who brag about how great they are do not realise how annoying it actually is
Study shows attempts to self-promote often have the opposite effect
If you want people to have a high opinion of you the key is not to tell them how brilliant you are.
Self-promoters - such as maverick England cricketer Kevin Pietersen - tend to misjudge how annoying they are to others, suggests new research.
Bragging to colleagues about a recent promotion, or posting a photo of your brand new car on Facebook, may seem like harmless ways to share good news.
However, the study shows that self-promotion or a 'humblebrag' often backfires.
Continue reading after the cut....
The researchers wanted to find out why so many people frequently get the trade-off between self-promotion and modesty wrong.
They found that self-promoters overestimate how much their self-promotion elicits positive emotions while underestimating how much it elicits negative emotions.
As a consequence, when people try to increase the favourability of the opinion others have of them, they excessively self-promote, which has the opposite of the intended effect.
Study lead author Doctor Irene Scopelliti, a lecturer in marketing at City University London, said: 'Most people probably realise that they experience emotions other than pure joy when they are on the receiving end of someone else's self-promotion.
'Yet, when we engage in self-promotion ourselves, we tend to overestimate others' positive reactions and underestimate their negative ones.
'These results are particularly important in the internet age, when opportunities for self-promotion have proliferated via social networking.
'The effects may be exacerbated by the additional distance between people sharing information and their recipient, which can both reduce the empathy of the self-promoter and decrease the sharing of pleasure by the recipient.'
The researchers ran two online experiments to find evidence of the misperception. They asked some participants to describe a time they had bragged about themselves (self-promoters) and asked others to describe a time that they were on the receiving end of someone else's bragging (recipients).
Taken together, the results from the two experiments indicated that self-promoters overestimate the extent to which people on the receiving end of their stories are likely to feel happy for them and proud of them. At the same time, they also seem to underestimate the extent to which recipients are likely to feel annoyed with them.
A third experiment examined the consequences of the miscalibration, revealing that recipients of excessive self-promotion view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts.
Fellow researcher George Loewenstein, Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, said: 'This shows how often, when we are trying to make a good impression, it backfires.
'Bragging is probably just the tip of the iceberg of the self-destructive things we do in the service of self-promotion, from unfortunate flourishes in public speeches to inept efforts to 'dress for success' to obviously insincere attempts to ingratiate ourselves to those in power.'
The researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Psychological Science, believe it could be valuable for both braggers and self-promotion recipients.
Joachim Vosgerau, professor of marketing at Bocconi University in Italy, added: 'It may be beneficial for people who plan to engage in self-promotion to try to realise that others may actually be less happy than they think to hear about their latest achievement.
'Recipients of such self-promotion who find themselves annoyed might likewise try to bolster their tolerance in the knowledge that braggarts genuinely underestimate others' negative reactions to their bragging.'
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