Beyonce, winner of Best Traditional R&B Performance for ‘Love on Top’, poses in the press room at the 55th Annual GRAMMY Awards, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images)
Social observers are particularly attuned to braggadocio. What do you think of a person who claims to be a better driver, performer or lover than average?
Is this person better described as confident or cocky; self-important or honest? Would you put your health or safety in their hands? And what about the opposite type of person, who claims to be worse than others? Would you hire this person for a job? In what field?Social scientists have been asking for decades whether boastful, self-aggrandising beliefs and behaviours are beneficial to those who make such claims. According to one school of thought, claiming to be better than others feels good, and when we feel good, we are happier and better adjusted. This argument suggests that bragging to others can satisfy the motive to craft and maintain a positive self-image. According to another line of research, however, consistently viewing oneself as superior entails a distortion of reality. Inaccurate individuals with low self-knowledge have weaker relationships and a tendency to make riskier decisions than their accurate, self-aware counterparts.
Together with Joachim Krueger at Brown University in Rhode Island, I recently proposed a middle ground: braggadocio could be a double-edged sword. In our paper in the journal Social Psychology, we argue that thinking you are better than average (and bragging to others about it) can damage some aspects of your reputation but boost others.
Bragging can help or harm depending upon your goals – so you’d do well to know what you want to accomplish before tooting your own horn.To test how observers respond to braggadocio and humility, we recruited nearly 400 volunteers and asked them to rate a series of target individuals along the two major dimensions of social perception: competence, including rationality, intelligence and naiveté, and morality, including ethics, trustworthiness and selfishness. Some of the targets were defined as performing better or worse than average without making claims Some claimed to be better or worse than average without any evidence. Others both made a claim about themselves (‘I did better/worse than average’) while researchers revealed their scores.
The results demonstrated several detrimental effects of boasting, although we observed some surprising benefits too. Perhaps the…
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