Humblebragging is irritating; this, you know. But the truth about that special, noxious blend of whining and boasting is that it also doesn’t even appear to work the way that humblebraggarts think it does, in that it doesn’t successfully get the intended message across, according to a new working paper from a team of Harvard Business School researchers. Sometimes, you’re better off just regular-bragging. 
 
 The researchers, Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino, and Michael I. Norton, tested people’s perception of humblebragging across five separate experiments. In one, they asked 302 people to imagine the person who said one of three statements: a complaint (“I am so bored”), a brag (“People mistake me for a model”), or a humblebrag (“I am so bored of people mistaking me for a model”). They were then asked to rate how much they liked this person, judging from this one statement, and how sincere the person seemed. 
 
 Overall, the study participants liked the complainers the best, and then the braggers; in last place, perhaps not surprisingly, were the humblebraggers. The participants also rated the complainers as most sincere and the humblebraggers as least sincere, which gets at one reason humblebragging is so obnoxious: It comes off as inauthentic. 
 
 In another experiment, the researchers showed that humblebragging isn’t an effective way to get your point across when compared to straightforward bragging. To test this, they had 201 people either read a brag (“I get hit on all the time”) or a humblebrag (“Just rolled out of bed and still get hit on all the time, so annoying.”); each group was asked to rate how attractive they’d guess the person behind the statement was. The findings showed that people consistently rated humblebraggers as less attractive than the braggers — 4.34 out of 7 for the humblebraggers, as compared to 4.91 for the braggers (a significant difference, though admittedly not a huge one). 
 
 Humblebragging, then, the researchers conclude, a self-promotion strategy you're better off avoiding. “Faced with the choice to (honestly) brag or (deceptively) humblebrag,” they write, “would-be self-promoters should choose the former — and at least reap the rewards of seeming sincere.” 

 Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2017 Humblebragging: A Distinct—and Ineffective—Self-Presentation Strategy by Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton 
 
 Abstract 
 
 Self-presentation is a fundamental aspect of social life, with myriad critical outcomes dependent on others’ impressions. We identify and offer the first empirical investigation of a prevalent, yet understudied self-presentation strategy: humblebragging. Across seven studies including a week-long diary study and a field experiment, we identify humblebragging—bragging masked by a complaint or humility—as a common, conceptually distinct, and ineffective form of self-presentation. We first document the ubiquity of humblebragging across several domains, from everyday life to social media. We then show that both forms of humblebragging—complaint-based or humility-based—are less effective than straightforward bragging, as they reduce liking, perceived competence, and compliance with requests. Despite being more common, complaint-based humblebrags are less effective than humility-based humblebrags and are even less effective than simply complaining. We show that people choose to deploy humblebrags particularly when motivated both to elicit sympathy and impress others. Despite the belief that combining bragging with complaining or humility confers the benefits of each strategy, we find that humblebragging confers the benefits of neither, instead backfiring because it is seen as insincere. 
 
 Keywords: Humblebragging; impression management; sincerity; liking; competence; interpersonal perception; Self-presentation; Perception; Marketing; Trust; Personal Development and Career; 
 
 Language: English Format: Print 79 pages SSRN Read Now
– Masking a brag with false modesty—known as a "humblebrag" in today's parlance—may seem like an effective way to boast about your achievements without seeming like, well, an egotistical jerk. But a working paper from Harvard Business School researchers finds exactly the opposite, noting that people may be better off simply bragging and self-promoting without shame than adopting a veneer of faux humility, the Science of Us reports. Even complainers fared better than humblebraggers in the study because they were viewed as more "sincere." The researchers conducted five separate experiments to test how people perceived humblebragging. In one of the experiments, 300 or so people were asked to rate hypothetical people who made the following three statements: "I am so bored" (complaint), "People mistake me for a model" (explicit brag), and the everyone-wishes-they-had this-problem remark of "I am so bored of people mistaking me for a model" (humblebrag). Not only did the participants rate the complainers as the most authentic (braggers came in second), but they also imagined the humblebraggers to be less attractive than the braggarts. "Despite people's belief that combining bragging and complaining confers the benefits of both self-promotion strategies, humblebragging fails to pay off," the researchers conclude. (One writer thinks celebrities are the worst humblebraggers.)