Do not promote self more, it may backfire
Bragging To Coworkers About A Recent Promotion Or Posting A Photo Of Your Brand New Car On Facebook May Not Be The Best Way To Share Good News, According To A New Study Which Found That Self-promotion Often Backfires.
Bragging to coworkers about a recent promotion or posting a photo of your brand new car on Facebook may not be the best way to share good news, according to a new study which found that self-promotion often backfires.Researchers found that recipients of excessive self-promotion view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts.The study from City University London, Carnegie Mellon University in the US and Bocconi University in Italy found that self-promoters overestimate how much their self-promotion elicits positive emotions and underestimate how much it elicits negative emotions.As a consequence, when people try to increase the favourability of the opinion others have of them, they excessively self-promote, which has the opposite of the intended effect.“Most people probably realise that they experience emotions other than pure joy when they are on the receiving end of someone else’s self-promotion,” said Irene Scopelliti, study’s lead author and a lecturer in marketing at City University London who conducted the research while a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon.“Yet, when we engage in self-promotion ourselves, we tend to overestimate others’ positive reactions and underestimate their negative ones,” said Scopelliti.“These results are particularly important in the Internet age, when opportunities for self-promotion have proliferated via social networking.“The effects may be exacerbated by the additional distance between people sharing information and their recipient, which can both reduce the empathy of the self-promoter and decrease the sharing of pleasure by the recipient,” she said.The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.