Protective Self-Presentation for Audiences with Interdependent Self-Construals on Ephemeral Platforms: The Case of Humblebragging

Humblebragging is conceptualized as a form of protective self-presentation that utilizes complaints or humility to avoid social penalties. Across two online experiments, participants viewed a fictitious person’s self-promotion attempt on Instagram, which differed in terms of self-presentation type (positive self-presentation vs. humblebragging) and message ephemerality (persistent vs. ephemeral). Results indicated that people who positively self-presented elicited greater task attraction among audiences than people who humblebragged. Mediation analyses also revealed that audiences perceived humblebragging as manipulative, which diminished their perceived social attraction and task attraction of the message sender. However, these advantages of positive self-presentation (vs. humblebragging) were constrained within persistent messages; the disadvantages of humblebragging were absent among ephemeral messages. Additionally, Study 1 found that audiences with greater interdependent self-construal appreciated humblebragging as an effective protective self-presentation strategy. Although prior research showed that humblebragging was ineffective, this research identified audience and message characteristics that minimized the deleterious effects of humblebragging.