Does Destruction Pursue The Great One?:miscalibrated Predictions Of Humblebragging

Self-presentation is an integral part of social interaction.People want to effectively manage the interpersonal impressions that they make on others,and using appropriate self-presentation strategies to present themselves is one of the most essential skills in social life.Self-promotion is a common strategy to enumerating one’s strength and positive traits.It,however,entails a trade-off between conveying one’s positive attributes and being seen as bragging.Straightforward bragging may make others feel threatened and produce negative interpersonal interaction results.Given the difficulty of striking the right balance,people often seek to present their qualities and accomplishments indirectly,and thereby humblebragging,as an indirect strategy that attempts to mask a brag in the guise of a complaint or humility,seems to strike a delicate balance between showing their advantages and being liked by others.This paper argues that the limitation in people’s emotional perspective taking when they are trying to instill a positive image in others,leads to make systematic errors when presenting themselves to others,which not only in mispredicting the extent to which their behaviors elicit specific emotional responses,but even—and often—in mispredicting the valence of the elicited responses.Emotion is the key factor of the connection between cognition and behavior,which expresses the cognition of humblebragging,and also affects the subsequent behavioral responses.Social exclusion,as a phenomenon that social relations are threatened,is quite different from the original intention of humblebragging who wants to be liked by others.The degree of observer’s acceptance of social exclusion is an important part of social exclusion cognition,which expresses the observer’s subjective judgment on the rationality of social exclusion events.Humblebragging will make the observers have higher disgust and lower admiration,and further increase the observer’s acceptance of social exclusion.In order to test the emotional and behavioral reaction of observers to humblebragger and the asymmetry of their understanding of humblebragging,this paper uses empirical method to explore the influence of humblebragging on observers’ acceptance of social exclusion behaviors and the mediating role of emotions.In Study 1,the expressions and contents of humblebragging in social media(study 1a)and daily life(study 1b)are described by content analysis.The results show that humblebragging is a common self-presentation strategy,including two forms: complaint-based and humility-based,and the content of expressions mainly focuses on the two dimensions of ability and wealth.In Study 2,one-factor between-subjects experimental design was used to explore the emotional and behavioral consequences of observers to humblebragging.The results show that,compared with straightforward bragging,observers have higher disgust and social exclusion acceptance of humblebragging,and lower admiration and liking.Study 3 divided into two stages.In the first stage used imagination paradigm to activate participants to use different self-promotion strategies,and then rated how they expected observers would evaluate them.Participants in the second stage evaluated the humblebraggers’ self-promotion strategies that generated through term frequency-inverse document frequency method.The asymmetry in the understanding of the humblebragging is explored by comparing first and second stage.The results show that humblebragger predicts lower levels of disgust,bragging perceptions,and social exclusion acceptance than straightforward bragger.The humblebragging predictions are biased by overestimating observers’ admiration and liking and underestimating observers’ disgust,bragging,and acceptance of social exclusion.Based on the above research,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The forms of humblebragging can be divided into two types: humility-based and complaint-based.The contents include ability,wealth,appearance and intimacy,and mainly focuses on ability and wealth.(2)Humblebragging Compared with straightforward bragging,people have higher disgust,acceptance of social exclusion,and lower envy.Emotions mediate the relationship between the types of self-promotion and observers’ acceptance of social exclusion.Humblebragging improves the acceptance of social exclusion by increasing observers’ disgust and reducing his/her admiration.(3)The humblebragger’s expectation of the effectiveness of the humblebragging is biased.Emotionally,humblebragger overestimates the observers’ admiration and underestimate observers’ disgust and envy.Behaviorally,humblebragger overestimates the observers’ liking and underestimate observers’ acceptance of social exclusion.