People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a tradeoff between conveying one’s positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this tradeoff wrong because they erroneously...

Disclosing personal successes and failures provides others with information not only about one’s outcomes, but also about one’s social preferences. We propose that this information, and the emotional reactions it conveys, influence a recipient’s decision to respond to the disclosure of...