Responses to Bragging and Self-Deprecation. Theory and Empirical Evidence

Disclosing personal successes and failures provides others with information not only about one’s outcomes, but also about one’s social preferences. We propose that this information, and the emotional reactions it conveys, influence a recipient’s decision to respond to the disclosure of successes or failures by a sender with disclosures of their own. Drawing on research on social utility and social preferences, we hypothesize that inequality aversion and a preference for reciprocity induce recipients to respond to a sender’s disclosure by revealing outcomes that are equal rather than unequal, regardless of whether the inequality is advantageous or disadvantageous to themselves. In a set of preregistered experiments using both scenarios and real conversations, we show that recipients are more likely to disclose a failure when a sender disclosed a failure than a success, and to disclose a success when a sender disclosed a success than a failure. We observe this equal outcome disclosure pattern in response to a sender’s disclosure. Yet, the pattern is attenuated when the same information is conveyed through a third party or as the quality of the relationship between the parties gets worse. We also observe a general aversion to brag by sharing a success, particularly pronounced in response to the disclosure of failures. These studies provide a new perspective on information disclosure in interactive response settings, show that insights from research on social utility and social preferences can be applied to self-disclosure, and challenge past research that depicts people as inept self-presenters and reluctant to share failures