What makes a person brag about themselves

This was one of the cases where I was riveted by a brag. But instead of pausing to allow the impact of the namedrop to take its toll, he spoke about how it felt to be in the presence of someone with so much power and cachet, raising his eyebrows wide in astonishment and then looking to the floor in what, barring a stellar acting performance, seemed to be genuine humility.

This was primarily a story about how he felt; who he had met was merely background detail, it would seem. At the very least, he did the noble thing and took the Lesser of Two Brags. He writes:. My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. PG tells us that he eventually became popular at school. Is this a micro brag to rescue his ego from the preceding admission of being uncool?

I found myself cheering for him too. Sometimes I see photos on Facebook of friends savoring an important moment, like signing a book contract, finishing a PhD, or winning a jam-eating contest.

Are these people bragging? On the other hand, why not discretely message the twenty people who care instead of blasting it out to followers? Sam constantly jokes about being physically intimidating.

Incidentally my favorite people in the world seem to be stranded here. In my quest to catch every brag known to man, I discovered that there is class of person who does everything in their power to avoid signaling status. Throughout our first and only conversation, he gave ridiculously indirect answers to my info-soliciting questions. Indeed he would even go so far as to feign not hearing me. I meant where in particular? His omissions cause such a jarring interruption to the normal flow of conversation that they amplify whatever he wishes to hide.

Owing to his odd way of avoiding bragging, I was soon desperate to Ditchell Mr. As such I am going to wheel out the armchair psychologist and dust off his little spectacles. Firstly, many of the brags were uttered by people with somewhat nervous temperaments. Sometimes I could sense an unease about them. Other times I was privy to background information, such as a history of mental illness. Secondly, bragging tended to happen with younger people, who generally have lower status in the ranks of society and a stronger need to prove themselves.

Thirdly, bragging was concentrated in initial getting-to-know-you interactions. Taking all of these tendencies together, it seems likely that a major driver for bragging is when the speaker feels they need to make a strong impression but also believes that their personal presentation, without the expected boost from bragging, will be insufficient. Drilling deeper, what causes the speaker to feel such a boost is necessary in the first place?

Studies about what causes people to over-share their relationship on social media e. Relatedly, is the following situation familiar to you? Say two people are speaking and one is significantly more successful than the other in a dimension where the other happens to be anxious about e.

This, in turn, creates an urge to either falsify information in the aggrieved dimension Bullshit Brag or to import status from a separate dimension where they feel more competitive e. Overall, the dynamic is that the insecure person attempts to address their wounds by convincing the other person that they are worthy — even though such a communication was neither necessary nor asked for. I know someone who moderates conferences for a living. After every event, he posts a picture onto Facebook of the audience — from the perspective of the stage looking outwards — and thanks the crowd in a fawning manner.

There is always a certain amount of bragging to these affairs, since both me and my lunch companion know the point is to communicate our value. Another driver for braggarts is something that at first seems like a superiority complex but in fact is something deeper.

The archetype I have in mind is the guy who only seems to feel whole once he has convinced everyone in the room that he is a deity of supernatural success and powers.

His self-esteem depends, in its entirety, on others buying into and holding these views — i. I had a friend of this variety in the past. He would spend every second sentence aggrandizing himself and every first one merely talking about himself. Perversely, many of his friends abandoned him exactly because of this constant communication of status. I was one of them, and I sometimes feel guilty about this. Another common driver for bragging is the emotional kick we get from self-disclosure.

Diana I. Tamir and Jason P. Mitchell showed in a study that individuals were willing to forgo money for the opportunity to disclose information about themselves. Given such a powerful urge for self-disclosure, it should come as no surprise that people may impose their status on others even though a voice in the back of their head might warn that it is socially ill-advised.

Many of us were fortunate enough to be brought up by loving parents who celebrated our every creative act, no matter how mundane, no matter how minor.

To these parents, even a productive potty session is cause for jubilation. There are people out there who are obsessed with dominance and who relish belittling others. Thankfully these types are not so common, but it would be naive to think that bragging is exclusively motivated by the gentler emotional drivers above. I have certainly been in situations where braggarts fully intended for their status to cut me. Readers of the first draft of this piece were fiercely concerned with what my definition of bragging encompassed, especially when it risked labelling some acts of their own as bragging.

For example, my girlfriend worried about whether showing her friends a video of her doing a pull-up was a brag. Her worry arises from the fact that social opprobrium is often attached to bragging, and no-one wants this opprobrium to extend to themselves. So for her and the other early readers, their real question was really about whether there is a social norm against certain behaviors, about whether they will be judged immodest or impolite and consequently liked less.

But what if she wanted to share something more classically impressive, like a new holiday home? So at the very least, even if my girlfriend had no intention to provoke envy by sharing something impressive, the revelation of differences in status would probably have this effect anyway.

How about the alternative of completely avoiding any comments that reveal status? Moreover, some status is impossible not to communicate — try hiding a yacht. Furthermore, there are many milieus, especially business and dating after 30, where tasteful communication of status is positively helpful — otherwise you risk getting glossed over in favor of a more boastful candidate. But it does. The real reason people disapprove of bragging is because they have the impression that you are not driven by the need to share, but rather by a desire to elevate yourself.

In other words, people have a basic resistance to self-directed claims to grandeur. But before their opprobrium applies, questions of culpability must first be resolved — was the brag intended or was it merely an accidental side-effect of something more socially acceptable? And here we get to the core of why so many people cloak their brags in a mask of plausible deniability: It shields them from disapproval.

There is a very real difference between learning that a friend earns 10x what you do and them browbeating you with it. This is exactly how I felt when I originally met Dr.

Feel Good, that braggart from the opening of the piece who claimed he had learned German in three weeks, at bars no less. Maybe I had made a mistake. I somehow got the chance to test this theory, as I bumped into Dr. Feel Good at a conference last month. True to form, he launched into telling me how successful his latest business venture had become and how he had the choice of clients.

All without my asking him. The point was that he wanted approval. So that I gave him. Join other polished penguins in receiving amusing yet deep future posts about social interaction.

Plus book annoucement. Go away. Penguins are stupid. Pictorial representation of the effect on my ego. II What Is Bragging? Click isupportlocal for more information on supporting our local journalists. Cornered by someone who goes on and on about his or her perfect life, intelligence and accomplishments.

Merriam-Webster defines the word, brag, as follows: to talk boastfully; displaying arrogant and pompous speech. Someone who does not toot their own horn. My research turned up several theories, generally revolving around the same theme. Braggers work hard — weaving elaborate stories — to get the admiration they crave. Still, it can be hard to stomach those insufferable conversations. Yet, she has just resigned herself to this behavior, admitting he has some narcissistic traits that compel him.

You really have to visit India for the authentic experience. Well, did Mr. The One-upmanship Brag is a real stinker, as pointed out on the above-mentioned website. You can see how the one-upper kept getting triggered. Yet, the one-upper gets repeatedly triggered to get the last word. Self-promoters tend not to understand just how annoying they can be to others. And, possibly, the worst offender of all? Name dropping. This can definitely backfire. A Harvard study found that sharing information about ourselves triggers the same sensations in the brain as eating food and having sex.

No wonder this can be so tempting. While you may be proud of your children and grandchildren, be sensitive to others. Psychologist Susan Newman cites an example of the mother of a bipolar child. Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms are often breeding grounds for embellishment. LinkedIn is a little less so, since its function is to connect people in networking situations, necessitating the listing of achievements.

Be humble; appreciate how you got there. Based on my experience and helpful hints from the website, www. You can always take baby steps to change. Let someone else take the spotlight for a change.

Be inwardly content. One time I remember driving past my aunt's beautiful house and saying to the girl, "That's where I live. Living in the luxurious waterfront house meant that I was someone special, and that's how I wanted others to view me. For most of my life I didn't see my bragging as a problem.

I did it, and most of the people I knew did it also. It was just something that people did. It wasn't until I developed the Lefkoe Method about 25 years ago and started to figure out what beliefs caused which problems that I realized that bragging is actually a way to compensate for a low level of self-esteem.

As I've written in the past, very few people escape childhood without forming a bunch of negative self-esteem beliefs. With few exceptions, parents aren't aware how their behavior is instrumental in the beliefs that their children are forming. And as I said a few weeks ago in a post about parenting, parents, being adults, generally like quiet; children are not quiet and cannot even understand why anyone would value quiet.

Parents, for the most, part want their house to be neat; young children don't even understand the concept of neat. Parents want to sit down for dinner when it is ready and before it gets cold; children are almost always doing something that is far more important to them and don't want to stop doing it when their parents call them.

In other words, parents usually want their children to do things that they are developmentally incapable of doing. They want their young children to act like little adults, which they cannot possibly do. The question is not whether children frequently disobey their parents.

Children are developmentally incapable of living up to most parents' expectations. The only question is how parents react when their children are not doing what they want them to do. And because few parents go to parenting school and most bring their own beliefs from their childhoods with them, their reactions range from annoyance and frustration to anger and abuse, with every possibility in between. So we form negative beliefs about ourselves.

Once we have a negative sense of ourselves, we need to find something that makes us feel good about ourselves, something that makes us feel able to survive and worthy of surviving. I call these survival-strategy behaviors, because they feel to us as if we need them to survive.