Money & society · 2015
Does disguising a boast as humility make people like you more than bragging openly?
No—in these studies, it made people like the speaker less and see them as less competent than straightforward bragging did. Across nine studies, researchers examined boasts disguised as either humility or complaints. Both forms performed worse than open bragging, though the abstract does not specify who participated or how large the differences were.
Details
Researchers studied humblebragging: boasting while making it sound like a complaint or an expression of humility. The nine studies included a week-long diary study and a field experiment, and examined the behavior in settings ranging from everyday life to social media.
Compared with straightforward bragging, both forms of humblebragging reduced liking, perceived competence, willingness to comply with requests, and financial generosity. Complaint-based humblebrags were more common but performed worse than humility-based ones—and even worse than simply complaining.
The researchers also found that people particularly chose humblebragging when they wanted both sympathy and admiration. Their findings point to perceived insincerity as the reason it backfired. This supports a comparison between presentation strategies in the studied settings, not a claim that open bragging always makes a good impression. The abstract gives no sample characteristics or effect sizes, so it cannot establish how large or broadly applicable the differences are.
What do you think?
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