Everyone hates the humble brag, except the humble braggers themselves. However, the humble brag involves yet another facet to which even the most sensitive anti-humble braggers may inadvertently fall prey. As pointed out by Leuven University’s Vera Hoorens and colleagues (2016), this other facet involves the hubris hypothesis. This is what happens when you openly state that you’re luckier, smarter, or just plain better than others in a way that lifts you but disparages them.
In the ordinary humble brag, you don’t compare yourself to others but simply announce- in a supposedly self-deprecating way- something you (or perhaps your child) has accomplished. You might even say “I don’t want to brag, but...” and what follows the “but” is clearly a brag. In the hubris hypothesis situation, the claims you make about your own worth come at the expense of acknowledging that you’re more worthy than the people within earshot. The example used by Hoorens et al. contrasts the statement “I am a better friend than others” with “I am a good friend.” Once you bring a comparison with others into the mix, you’re using what Hoorens and her fellow researchers call “explicit” hubris. If you simply state that you’re a good friend, with no comparisons involved, it’s the safer version called “implicit” hubris.
The specific type of hubris that the Leuven University group investigated involved optimism. We usually think of optimism as a good thing, but it can lead to explicit hubris if you let everyone else know how luckier, happier, healthier etc. you are relative to them. You won’t get the cold that’s going around, you claim, but you’re pretty sure everyone else will. Somehow the lord of health will preserve you but rain down nothing but infection on everyone else. It’s fine to be an optimist (”I hardly ever get sick”) but if you’re the hubris form of optimist, you’ll just make others resent you (”Everyone else gets sick, but not me”). Why should your immune system somehow resist the germs that infect others? You can hope you don’t get sick, which is normal optimism, but claiming that you won’t while others will triggers the hubris effect.
Hoorens and her team, wanted to know whether people who made these hubris-tinged claims (explicit optimism) would be seen more negatively than people whose optimism was framed in implicit terms. In the first experiment, the researchers presented three scenarios depicting individuals who were either optimistic or pessimistic about living to be old, finding romantic happiness, and experiencing happy family relationships. Absolute optimism was represented by having the claimant project optimism for him or herself without comparison to other students. Comparative optimists projected having more positive outcomes than for themselves than for the average other student.
In keeping with the hubris hypothesis, people rated the comparative optimists less warmly than they rated the absolute optimists, and as a result, didn’t want to affiliate with them. The second experiment, added the feature of having relative optimists state they were better off than the participants (i.e. the actual people in the study), where the sunny outcomes expected by the claimants came at the expense of the participants themselves. These hubris-tinged statements were also rated negatively by the participants.
The authors concluded, therefore, that “optimism loses some of its appeal when it is expressed in a comparative than an absolute manner and that it does so because comparative expressions of optimism suggest that the claimant views the observers’ future gloomily” (p. 9).
It is true that most people do prefer to see themselves as “better” than the average person. What happens with the hubris hypothesis is that we don’t like it when someone else openly expresses that viewpoint. It’s fine to think you’re luckier, happier, or more likable than everyone else, but the minute you put this comparative claim into words, you’ll end up facing the exact opposite outcome.
In summary, we know that bragging is the kind of behavior that most of us would rather avoid being exposed to. These studies on comparative optimism show, further, that it’s the hubris expressed at the expense of others that make that particular form of bragging so objectionable. When you try to avoid the humble brag, then, add the caution from the Belgian study and keep your comparative optimistic claims in check.
Reference:
Hoorens, V., Van Damme, C., Helweg-Larsen, M., & Sedikides, C. (2016). The hubris hypothesis: The downside of comparative optimism displays. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2016.07.003