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Humblebragging Is A Bad Idea, Scientists Confirm

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Do you like humblebrags? Of course not. A new study confirms what you have always believed about these faux-modest missives: nobody likes them, and they don’t work.

Ovul Sezer, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, co-authored the study “Humblebragging: A Distinct — And Ineffective — Self-Presentation Strategy.” As Sezer began her research — first by looking through the late Harris Wittel’s Twitter feed — she found that humblebrags have that Baader-Meinhof quality: “One of the fascinating things was, once you start thinking about humblebrags, they’re so ubiquitous,” she said. “You can’t stop seeing them.”

She and her fellow researchers, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton, “became these humblebrag detectives, because they’re literally everywhere,” she said. “I’m not sure people who humblebrag realize that they’re everywhere.”

To get a handle on the sprawling world of humblebrags, the team settled on as simple a definition as possible: “bragging in guise of complaint, or bragging masked by a complaint.” This encompasses tweets that express surprise or boredom at the objectively expected or exciting, and the oft-used “awkward.” “A complaint is an expression of unfavorable attitudes,” Sezer explained. “Like bragging would be just, ‘I got four Emmy awards,’ or ‘I’m great that I got this.’ Whereas if you couch it in any complaint, confusion, embarrassment, finding it awkward, that would be a humblebrag.”

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Humblebrag from Funny Or Die

Sezer and her colleagues started their research with “more outrageous examples,” including “I’m so bored of people thinking i’m a model,” which is a real thing someone tweeted! Then they expanded the study beyond social media to face-to-face interactions where people are inclined to humblebrag, specifically, “in job interview contexts, where people do it to make a good impression,” said Sezer.

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The two goals of a humblebrag are (1) to leave the listener or reader with a positive impression of the speaker and (2) to get across whatever desirable attribute that is the subject of the speaker’s humblebrag. However, by these metrics, as Sezer’s study found, humblebragging is completely ineffective.

The study measured the effect of a humblebrag on a few different metrics, measuring each on a scale of one to seven, including liking, sincerity, and competence (as in, how the listener would perceive the humblebragger: are they likeable, sincere, competent?). It turns out humblebragging “is not only costly in terms of the impressions you create with others, but it doesn’t even show the trait you’re trying to emphasize,” Sezer said. To quote from the study, “These findings offer initial evidence that the more individuals are perceived to use humblebragging the more they come across as less likeable, sincere, and competent.”

In fact, a humblebrag “doesn’t highlight your success as much as a brag would do,” said Sezer.

So where does humblebragging come from? The way Sezer described it, humblebragging is the negative result of trying to be too many positive things at once. “Cross-culturally, we know that modesty is good,” she said. “So we implicitly know that bragging is something we are not supposed to do, and therefore, we engage in this indirect way of bragging or self-promotion.” We want people to know how cool or smart or beautiful we are, but we know enough to know that modesty is one of those virtues everybody values. So instead of just setting modesty aside and owning whatever attractive trait we want to shout from the rooftops, we attempt to camouflage our unbecoming pride in an invisibility cloak of humility.

But there’s one other quality we prize even above modesty: sincerity. This is where humblebrags really fall apart. “Once people notice that you want to make a good impression — once there is this ulterior motive — we don’t find it sincere, and that’s very interesting to me,” said Sezer. “Maybe we are not enamored with braggarts or complainers either. But in the paper, we’ve found even complaining is better, because it’s at least sincere. When someone says ‘I’m bored,’ at least that’s their real concern.”

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This may be why humblebragging feels more prevalent on social media than in does in in-person interactions, or why it reads as more egregious and offensive on Twitter than it does in a natural conversation. In the course of a normal dialogue, you may be called upon to share something exceptional about yourself, even as the answer to a simple question like, “What did you do this weekend?” Maybe you just went on a great vacation, or you got engaged, or you found out about a big promotion. But no one is coercing you into tweeting about your successes; no one’s pressing your thumbs down on your phone and making you upload photos of your fantastic trip to Bali on Instagram. There is no avoiding the fact that your tweets are yours and yours alone.

“With social media, it sort of feeds on itself,” Sezer added. “The more visible it is, the more likely maybe you are to engage in humblebragging, because we see others do it… And in social media, to stay relevant, you have to say something about yourself. So all of that creates this venue where humblebragging becomes sort of like a norm.”

Yet here’s the thing: everyone humblebrags. Even you, dear reader. “You’re not immune to it; we’re all susceptible to it, to some extent,” said Sezer. “I see it very often, including in myself. That’s one of the things I didn’t expect.”