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Key points
- Bragging pleases the braggarts more than their audience, but the braggarts don’t know this.
- Authentic pride can be distinguished from hubristic pride.
- Claims to fame ring hollow unless they are supported by evidence of competent or virtuous action.
Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass. —Shakespeare
No one likes a braggart. Indeed, the term’s definition and connotation entail a negative evaluation. Despite its social harmfulness, however, bragging has not died out. How can this be?
Bragging is a form of self-promotion and self-promotion is not bad by definition. It has its uses. Students of persuasive speech learn that they must establish their credentials, that is, their expertise on the subject matter they are about to discuss. Audiences of goodwill want to learn, and they will appreciate credible claims of expertise. Sometimes, you see, we have to toot our own horn because no one else will do it for us—and when we do, we do gain advantages.
Bragging, however, is different from the communication of expert credentials. Bragging is gratuitous. It seeks applause from the audience without offering anything in return. When braggarts only gratify themselves without creating value for the audience, they should realize that it is time to step on the brakes.
Still, audiences may be forgiving or ignorant, and braggarts may know this. Research shows that simply claiming to be above average on some talent or skill induces observers to perceive the claimant as competent—at least until the claim is proven to be false (Heck & Krueger, 2016). In other words, bragging may work because the audience does not have enough information (yet) to evaluate the braggart objectively.
Braggarts may try to anticipate—and manage—the audience’s reaction to their exuberant self-presentation, and here desire encroaches on reality. Scopelliti et al. (2015) showed that braggarts have empathy gaps they are unaware of. They project the positive feelings stirred up within themselves by their own bragging onto others without realizing that these others do not care as much about them as they themselves do. Braggarts pay a reputational cost because they fail at perspective-taking.
Self-praise, i.e., bragging, amounts to an expression of pride. During the era of the Enlightenment, David Hume was skeptical of a view shared by many philosophers at the time that expressions of pride are necessarily signs of vanity, or, as he would put it, vainglory. Hume (1776/2015) argued that vanity or pleasure-seeking is not the cause of virtuous acts, that is, virtuous acts are not byproducts of vanity, but that instead the pleasure of self-satisfaction is caused by virtuous actions. When we act virtuously, Hume argued, feelings of pride or self-satisfaction are morally justified. Why not feel good after having done good?
Recent research suggests that both Hume and the philosophers he criticized had a point. In a series of studies, Jessica Tracy and her collaborators have brought the distinction between authentic and hubristic pride to light (see Mercadante et al., 2021, for an overview). Whereas authentic pride is grounded in effortful achievement (what Hume called virtuous action), hubristic pride is grounded in the idea of one’s own intrinsic superiority.
Observers are attuned to the difference. They can, for example, tell hubristic from authentic pride from differences in body posture and gaze behavior (e.g., a braggart is more likely to stare at you as if demanding validation).
Intriguing as this research is, it returns us to the question of why bragging is not self-eliminating. Are some braggarts perhaps self-sufficient as their own adoring audience? Such individuals only need others to witness their self-congratulation; these others do not need to endorse it. Other braggarts, of a more insecure stripe, need the audience to agree with them; they seek to extract approval with tactics such as fishing for compliments.
Sophisticated braggarts use nuance to lavish praise on themselves (Krueger, 2017). They will not, like Muhammad Ali, baldly declare that they are the greatest; they will only let you in on the fact that third parties, especially parties of high prestige, have already done the lavishing. On the websites of some academics, for example, one may find a list of awards, emphasis on the prestige of these awards (if you did not know), and even added emphasis on the fact that the self-describer was the very first person to win this very prestigious award, without ever being told what that person actually did to win these awards.
This strategy of showing off one’s existing fame is, alas, self-limiting. Eventually, discerning audiences will ask, "And what is it that you actually do?" Being famous for being famous lacks substance. The braggart is, as Shakespeare put it, shown up as an ass (i.e., a donkey). Still, the possibility remains that less discerning audiences settle for appearances, at least as long as they don’t have to pay. Perhaps this is enough for the braggart.
All told, psychology gives little comfort to the braggart. Stephen Hawking put The Bard’s verdict more colloquially: “People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.” Then again, who would ever make such a boast in the presence of Stephen? Such a person would definitely have to be a loser.
References
Heck, P. R., & Krueger, J. I. (2016). Social perception of self-enhancement bias and error. Social Psychology, 47, 327-339.
Hume, D. (1776/2015). Essays: Moral, political, literary. Wallachia
Krueger, J. I. (2017). Bragitude. Psychology Today Online. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/one-among-many/201706/bragitude
Mercadante, E., Witkower, Z., & Tracy, J. (2021). The psychological structure, social consequences, function, and expression of pride experiences. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 39, 130-135.
Scopelliti, I., Loewenstein, G., & Vosgerau, J. (2015). You call it “self-exuberance”; I call it “bragging”: Miscalibrated predictions of emotional responses to self-promotion. Psychological Science, 26, 903-914.
