Bragging May Bring You Down, New Study Shows

Bragging isn't always the most positive personal attribute. Not only that, but it could also be self-destructive in its own right, as well.

New findings published in the journal Psycholgoical Science show that even a humble brag could be going against positivity.

Researchers at City University London, Carnegie Mellon and Bocconi universities found that self-promoters who posted a photo of their brand new car on Facebook or bragged about a raise oftentimes underestimated how their self-promotion elicited negative emotions.

For the study, researchers conducted two experiments to examine the evidence of why self-promoters overestimated the positive reactions of good news from their bragging but underestimated the negative emotions associated with it. A third study looked at how excessive self-promotion showed self-promoters as showoffs and made them more unlikable to others at times.

"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," concluded lead study author Irene Scopelliti, in a news release.