title: You call it "self-exuberance"; I call it "bragging": miscalibrated predictions of emotional responses to self-promotion.
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).
authors.affiliation: Cass Business School, City University London irene.scopelliti@city.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Irene
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Scopelliti
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University.
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Loewenstein
authors.affiliation: Department of Marketing, Bocconi University.
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Vosgerau
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012649:Self Concept; D012919:Social Behavior; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: emotions; interpersonal relationships; judgment; open data; open materials; social behavior; social interaction