Speaking of Psychology: Why humblebragging is never a good idea, with Övül Sezer, PhD

We all want to be liked and respected. But sometimes, our intuitions about how to make a good impression lead us astray. Övül Sezer, PhD, talks about common mistakes, including humblebragging and hiding our accomplishments; whether the rules of making a good impression are different on social media; and how to “brag wisely” by sharing your journey rather than listing your accomplishments.

Övül Sezer, PhD, is an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Cornell University SC Johnson School of Business. Her research focuses on impression (mis)management—the mistakes we make when we want to impress others.

Kim Mills: Everyone wants to be liked and respected. Whether you’re meeting a new colleague, trying to impress your boss, setting up your profile on a dating app, or even just chatting with a neighbor, some part of your brain is probably thinking about how your words and actions are coming across. Sometimes our intuitions are correct, but sometimes they’re not. Today we’re going to talk to a researcher who studies impression mismanagement—the mistakes we make when we’re trying to make other people like us.

So why do people so often misjudge what will make a good impression? What are some of the most common mistakes? If you want people to like and respect you, is it better to boast a little bit or stay quiet about your accomplishments? And what about social media? Are the behaviors that make a good impression online the same ones that work in real life?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Övül Sezer, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s SC Johnson School of Business. Her research focuses on the mistakes we make when we want to impress others and how we can better navigate our social world. Questions she’s looked at include: How can we signal that we’re both competent and likable? How can a person brag wisely? And how can we network less awkwardly? Her work has been published in top psychology and management journals and covered in media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. 

Dr. Sezer, thank you for joining me today.

Övül Sezer, PhD: Thank you so much, Kim. It’s so great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Mills: Now, you call your work impression mismanagement. Can you start by telling us more about that? What is impression mismanagement? And conversely, what is impression management?

Sezer: This is a great question because any time I get asked, What is impression mismanagement?, I start by explaining what actually is impression management. So that’s a great start. So it’s the psychology of how we try to look good in front of others, the ways we try to shape how others perceive us, whether we want to come across as likable, warm, competent, high status, trustworthy. So we all have these goals when we interact with others, whether it’s a job interview, negotiation context, presentation in front of clients, or trying to get a second date, or curating our perfect LinkedIn posts.

All of these instances require some impression management and we are all aware of it. Sometimes it will be more conscious, sometimes it’ll be less conscious, but we’re all aware of it. Mismanagement is when our intuitions go wrong, and sometimes we end up engaging in the wrong strategy and we end up shooting ourselves in the foot because the strategies we try undermine us, it actually backfires. So that’s the mismanagement part. And we all have these intuitions coming from somewhere, because no one teaches us how to brag. No one teaches us how to do networking. These are the things we learn as we navigate life.

Mills: So what are some of the most common mistakes that people make when they’re trying to get other people to like or respect them?

Sezer: I have a long list of strategies that I’ve looked at. So for both—I mean since my dissertation research and now as an assistant professor. So if I go on and on you can stop me anytime. That’s okay. Because I’m very passionate about this and I love talking about this. So it all started with my dissertation work where we tried to understand what are some more sophisticated self-promotion strategies that people engage in. Because we all know bragging is not the most desirable thing. We all know that even since very young age, we are aware, Oh, I don’t need to be too arrogant. I shouldn’t be too arrogant because we want to be invited to parties and included in all the friends settings. So we don’t want to brag too much. So that intuition is right. It’s a universal value. Modesty, humility. These are things that we all care about across cultures.

But people do this interesting thing called humblebragging. And I would like to welcome everybody to my world of social paranoia because now I’m going to notice my humblebrags during this podcast and maybe our audience will also start catching more humblebrags as they listen too, because that’s exactly what happened to me when I first started investigating this phenomenon. So it’s basically bragging masked by complaint or false humility. So if I say something like, Oh my goodness, why do people hit on me even when I’m in my sweatpants? Oh, the Uber driver thought I’m 23. Does that make sense? Isn’t that—or I can’t believe I got this award. Thank you so much. I can go on. Maybe I’ll give some meta humblebrags. It’s so hard to be invited on podcasts all the time, Kim. I just—okay, I’ll stop. I’ll stop. But you can see how much we do it. 

Mills: It’s very common. 

Sezer: It is absolutely very common. And of course some of the examples that I give right now, I mean seemingly outrageous and funny, I do it on purpose, but even in instances where it’s not funny, when people get the job interview question, what’s your biggest weakness? A lot of people end up saying, I’m a perfectionist. I work too hard. I’m too nice. I prioritize my friends and family. People list all their great qualities as if they are weaknesses.

So it happens. It happens all the time. And what we found was that even though people do it because they know bragging is bad and they think this is going to provide that sweet spot best of both worlds—so I’m going to brag, but I’m going to soften it. So I’m going to both covey my great qualities and accomplishments, but I will soften it. I will frame it as a complaint or a little modest thing. But what ends up happening is that it actually backfires. It’s worse than straightforward bragging. And the reason is because it comes across as very insincere. Being sincere, being authentic is something that we value a lot in others. So when the person is trying to brag but trying to hide it, it’s actually more offensive to the recipient. So we don’t like it. So humblebragging is one of the common mistakes that happen.

Anytime I talk about this work, I used to get the question, what if I don’t share anything? What if I don’t say anything? Now the first risk about that in the world of I think we can say that our world is full of self-promotion right now with the existence of social media. Just one quick look at LinkedIn or Instagram is enough. You would never feel lack of self-promotion around you. So if you don’t share anything, there is the risk of missing out because now we live in a world where we need to emphasize our expertise. I don’t mean to say we should brag all the time, but I just want to say not saying anything and staying quiet has its own risks. But if you have something good to share and if you don’t share it—and we had this paper, we called it hiding success—especially the people around you who are close to you, maybe your close work friends, close friends and some family members, they do get offended a little bit this time because they think, oh, you don’t think I’m going to be happy for you? That’s offensive. Or do you think I’m going to be jealous of you? So there is that. Sometimes it backfires, even though we have the good intentions of not looking arrogant and not offending everybody, sometimes it ends up being offensive because people think, oh, you’re trying to regulate my emotional reaction to your success. I will just be happy for you. So that backfires as well, and that’s a very common thing.

And the reason why I say these are common strategies is because we did run lots of, I mean, first of all, they’re common on social media and we did analyze that data, but we also survey people or run diary studies with people where people report surveys every day at a certain time for us. Or we ask people, have you ever hidden success from somebody else? And the answers were very interesting because from—it starts very young like, Oh, I used to get better grades than my classmate in primary school and I didn’t say that. Or I never shared the name of my high-status school name in my family. Things like that. People try to navigate that all the time. So that’s why I say these intuitions are very common. But they end up not working.

And other things as well, like I study name dropping, you know where you casually drop a name into conversation. Now I’m sure I’m going to do that during this interview. Or I also study compliments or thank yous or apologies or advice giving, advice taking. And there are things that we do wrong in this domain as well. For instance, people sometimes make their compliments backhanded. If someone tells me, Oh, your English is pretty good for an international, I would be like, What do you mean? My English is amazing? Or things—or if someone tells me, You’re funny for a woman, because I try to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, I try to do stand-up comedy as a hobby. So I would be like, No way. That’s not necessarily a compliment. So things like that. There are lots of different versions we can talk about.

Mills: How cognizant do you think people are of doing these things?

Sezer: When people are interacting with others, we are very aware when someone else does it—and we don’t even care whether it’s true or not. Someone can really maybe be complaining about having lots of job offers and stuff like that in a genuine way. Maybe they really mean it. But for us, we would be like, Oh, that’s like a humblebrag. That’s kind of a weird thing to say.

But in our experiments, anytime we put people in positions and we give them impression management calls, like imagine I take you to my lab and I say you’re going to talk with another person for five minutes either through chat or face-to-face. And let’s say I tell you your goal is to impress the other person, try to impress them. And I’m going to ask them at the end of your interaction how impressive you were and based on how they rate you, I’m going to give you bonus money. So I incentivize you for this call. And when people are in this position, they do become less cognizant of these behaviors. Then we do brag, we do humblebrag, we do these other behaviors. So I think when we are in the position of presenting ourselves, we somehow forget.

I think another reason by the way, that these mistakes still exist and it’s so hard to learn over time—we never get in-time feedback. No one rolls their eyes in front of us or there’s no yeah, or there’s no dislike button on LinkedIn. No one tells it to our face that it was kind of a weird thing to say. So you end up navigating always with your intuition.

Mills: Why do people make these mistakes? You mentioned that we don’t really learn how to make a first impression. Is that something that should be taught somewhere in life?

Sezer: I think so. I do teach impression management classes in my leadership class when I teach both MBAs and undergrads. So I think there are definitely things we can learn, but your question about why do we even make these mistakes is even a bigger one. So some of it comes from we never learn because we don’t get the feedback. I think some of it comes from the problem of having multiple audience in the room, and with the way that the internet works or social media works, it became even stronger. What I mean by multiple audiences is that having our family members or our parents and our boss and our team members in the same network makes it very hard.

So here’s what I mean by that. If I say—for us for academics or publishing papers is one measure of success, it’s a great thing for us, we get very happy, even if only five people read our paper, we’re still very, very happy because it’s a contribution and we worked hard on it. And if I share it, let’s say with my mom, there’s no way she can, no way she’ll code it as bragging. She’ll be like, oh, that’s wonderful. Or same thing if we share things like this, like our promotion, our award, with someone like a boss, they’ll be proud of us. But if we share it with a peer who was aiming for maybe the same award, same promotion, then things change because we have the whole social comparison dynamic there. But right now, because everyone is available all the time in the same platforms, we have this multiple audience issue. Everyone is in the same room and how do I create that profile now? That’s why sometimes you would see some people just do professional social media and personal social media separately. They try to create separate pages for that, which I totally understand why.

Another reason why we make these mistakes: Sometimes we try to regulate our own emotions. It feels good to brag that—there is research actually by some wonderful colleagues, it feels good. We feel good when we feel positive, when we brag, even though there is that discomfort when we think of other people’s interactions, there is definitely this—pride is a very interesting self-conscious emotion and we like that. And sometimes we engage in these mistakes because we are trying to feel good about ourselves.

And sometimes it’s a perspective taking mistake. Sometimes we just don’t understand how it’s going to come across to the other side. So there are these multiple different processes. Sometimes it’s the emotional reason, sometimes it’s the other people are in the room and there are just so many different goals with any of these relationships. The way that I interact with my best friend is not the same as I interact with my boss, but if they’re all seeing my LinkedIn post, there’s no, I need to choose one style. So things like that make the mistakes even more inevitable in a way.

Mills: We were talking a moment ago about the workplace and that cliche question about what’s your greatest weakness. Another thing that comes up in some workplaces is the 360-degree evaluation. Since you do this kind of work, I mean, how useful is that to people? Do they really learn anything from a 360 when all is said and done?

Sezer: I think 360 evaluations may work if people really believe that they’re really anonymous and no one is getting the—so the status differences definitely do play a role because no one wants to be giving negative feedback to their superior or their boss when their name or identity can be found out for sure. So people definitely have that concern. I think the way that people respond to 360 feedback makes it likely to work or not. And I’m going to give you the example of what we studied. This is also kind of related to impression management, but it’s also related to feedback taking and authenticity. So we looked at how leaders react to 360 feedback because they get feedback from people who work as direct reports. And when people, especially when leaders get negative feedback, they have this bias, they want to address it very quickly. They say, here it is, I listened to you, I look at your feedback and I hear you and I incorporated this change immediately.

But what we found is that when that change happens very quickly and very immediately, other people don’t find it authentic. They think, oh, you only changed because I gave you that feedback. But it’s not internalized. You didn’t think about it, you didn’t reflect on it, you didn’t internalize it. But when it’s done in a way that’s a bit gradual and over time, then people really think you really pay attention. So that’s one, it’s not necessarily an impression mistake, but it’s like a feedback mistake where it hurts how authentic you come across. So it ends up being an impression management mistake. So when we get feedback, we shouldn’t be too quick to address it. We should still tell people we hear them and we’re working on it, but it should be a long-term gradual change rather than very immediate, very quick, loud change.

So sometimes this gradual change is more effective in terms of coming across as an authentic leader. So based on that, I can tell you that 360 feedback may work, but it depends how we react to it. I don’t know if I answered your question or this was very specific about the paper too, but as you know, I look for opportunities to brag. So thank you for letting us know that this paper is coming out. Okay, exactly. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I thought it’s a bit relevant with the authenticity angle too, so I wanted to share that.

Mills: I just want the listeners to know that we didn’t set this up so that you could brag.

Sezer: Absolutely, yeah, this was all authentic.

Mills: I didn’t know about your paper. Yeah. This was totally authentic. Let me ask you, going down another lane here, have you found any gender or cultural differences in how people handle impression management or mismanagement or how they respond to people who might be using some of the strategies to make a better impression?

Sezer: The answer is absolutely yes, because both gender and cultural differences determine our norms. And how we are perceived or whether we engage in this behavior or not, really depends on the social norms around us. I mean, even when we think of social media, I’m always curious how did it become what it is today? I recently went back to my Twitter feed, I wanted to find out what’s the very first tweet I shared with the world. And it was like, “I like to cook.” That was my first tweet, which probably doesn’t make sense in today’s world. Why did I share that?

Mills: But you didn’t say “I’m a good cook.”

Sezer: No, I just said because probably at the time there wasn’t that much of bragging norm. Or when Facebook first got into our lives or LinkedIn, it was a different thing and now it’s a much different thing. So norms definitely determine how we behave in these platforms and in real life as well. And gender and cultural differences are absolutely key ingredients for social norms. So when it comes to gender, there’s definitely the role theory as researchers would call it, would explain there’s expected roles for men and women. And women know that modesty is a more communal, more warmth-related norm, which is associated more female, more with female characteristics. So women know that it’s going to hurt them more and it actually does hurt them more a little bit. Bragging is not the same for a man versus for a woman.

So women receive a little bit more backlash. And because of that, I think women, the direct self-promotion, why women are a little less, there’s more indirect self-promotion efforts engaged by everyone. And it’s a very tricky balance of course, because what I find in my dissertation work was also that even the domain of bragging—the topic of bragging matters too. When we brag about leadership versus when we brag about cooking or things like that also changes the norms around this. So women receive more backlash when they’re direct and because they’re aware of it and it’s—because it’s an expected behavior, modesty is expected more by women, they refrain a little bit more from self-promotion.

And cultural differences definitely determine how these efforts are perceived, especially when it comes to collectivistic cultures versus individualistic cultures. Like some cultures are more collectivistic, some cultures are more individualistic. We haven’t published this, but I did get a chance when I did run only one study, so I’m going to give this with that. But even in that one experiment, when we ran the experiments with U.S. and also Japan, participants from Japan, where Japanese culture is much more collectivistic than U.S. culture, humble bragging there wasn’t that bad because humility is much more of a value there. People definitely deflect bragging in a genuine way, because no one wants to say, I, me, I did this, I’m the best. That’s very forbidden in those cultures. So we did find that difference in that one study I could run. So there’s definitely cross-cultural differences there.

Mills: There’s a term that has come into common usage in the U.S. in, I don’t know, the last few years—mansplaining. And I’m just wondering if that is a reflection of the fact that men do tend to sort of take over and tell you what they know? And is that a form of impression mismanagement?

Sezer: Yeah, that’s a great question too. We did have some studies around this phenomenon because especially this term mansplaining was very, it’s still common, but it had its very popular day a few years ago. Maybe it is true that a lot of people do say they experience mansplaining, especially in the workplace. What we find is that it’s usually status explaining though—when there’s high status positions are occupied by mostly men at this point in our lives everywhere in the world. And high status gives that drive to, Let me explain things to you. And sometimes again—I mean this was just survey-based data, so people self-report experiences, but people do find that not all mansplaining are equal, meaning that sometimes it backfires, and it’s an example of impression mismanagement because it’s a bit condescending.

If someone explains to me, I don’t know, how to watch sports just because I’m a woman, things like that would be an example of that, for instance. So yeah, sometimes advice giving that if happens, if it happens in the form of mansplaining or status explaining. So sometimes it can be also womansplaining, I guess if the high-status agent is a woman. It does backfire because of two things. Sometimes it can be based on gender stereotypes, which are, of course, offensive. When I said the sports example, I know I’m a huge soccer fan, I know soccer rules more than anybody else, and that’s definitely offensive. But sometimes it just happens because of status differences and people just don’t know where to put you, especially if you are on the younger end. That’s why sometimes even men receive mansplaining too, because if they’re young and if they seem like they don’t know what they’re doing, even though they would know, but just based on the perceived level of their status and their age, and then you get this unsolicited advice that may end up being condescending regardless of what the intention of the explainer was. So it can definitely be a form of impression mismanagement there.

Mills: Can people use techniques to sort of attenuate the bad reaction that they might be getting? So for example, when you say to people, Hey, how much do you know about sports? I mean, I know a lot about this particular sport. And so sort of opening the door to letting the other person know or say to you, yeah, I’m very familiar, say with soccer, then you can approach each other more on an equal level. Does that help?

Sezer: Absolutely. In fact, I’m a big fan of these pre-explanations. That’s why probably in any social interaction that I’m in, I give this long introductions to any topic because probably I’m very aware of this. As I said, as someone who studies these things, I think it’s always a good idea to give some more information about context or yourself or ask the other person. We also know that asking questions is a great strategy because people love talking about themselves. So if you ask questions, people always love it. It also signals that you’re curious about them. If you share and you ask a question, you’re curious about them. And curiosity is one of the things that we can all aim to induce in others. In fact, for bragging, the best strategy is to find a wingperson for our brags. If someone brags on behalf of us when we are not present, that’s the best thing that can happen. So let’s make a pact, Kim, from now on, I’m going to brag about you. Please brag about me, and we have our friendly brag loop going on.

Mills: All right. That’s a deal.

Sezer: And I think the reason why it works very well, because number one, you are not there. So there’s no ulterior motive, no one questions the legitimacy of the brag. Number two, you are curious about the person. If you hear about someone from another person, you’re like, Oh, let me check. Do they have—can I google them? Are they on Instagram? What’s the work that they do? Do they have a website where I can learn about their work? So curiosity is a very important piece. So asking questions or finding someone else to brag for us are great strategies.

And going back to your question, that’s why if you’re in a situation where our level is not necessarily well known by the other person or we don’t know their knowledge level, if we can ask questions, we can share where we’re coming from. And that would stop all of the misunderstanding around advice giving or advice taking. And I’ll say a few things about in general, how it’s a great idea, I said both asking questions, but also sharing our journey too, which is another research that we did. So I’m a fan of these explanations and these extra conversations so that there’s no mismanagement or misunderstanding.

Mills: Another thing that you’ve written about is how tough it is to balance trying to be liked and trying to be respected. So can you talk about that? I mean, how do you pull off that balancing act?

Sezer: It’s probably the question that all impression management researchers or social cognition, social perception researchers around the world think about every day all the time, because it’s called the self-promotion paradox. So what we know from social perception literature is that when we meet with someone, when we evaluate others, there are these two universal dimensions that we care about, warmth and competence. So when I meet with someone I care about whether they’re friendly, warm, nice, do I want to hang out with them? And I also care about are they smart, capable, competent, do I want to work with them or can I interact with them in that context? Now, the tricky thing, the self-promotion paradox comes from fact that the strategies that take us to high warmth or high likability don’t make us look highly competent.

So I’m going to give examples: If we smile all the time, if we agree all the time, if you’re very conforming, if we’re getting gifts to other people, giving compliments to other people, these things would make us be liked. Everyone would like us, but no one would necessarily think, oh my God, look at that person. They’ve got a PhD. They’re a very interesting person who did all of these accomplishments in their career, life. And vice versa. If I’m competent, if I just talk about my accomplishments, then people wouldn’t like me, right? That’s called the self-promotion paradox. So it’s very hard to get to both because there is that trade off. The warmer we are, there’s a chance that we may look less competent and the more competent and smart and high status and respectable we look, we may look more distant and less likable and less warm.

Some strategies work. One is definitely humor when it’s done well. So if you can incorporate humor in a smart way, it’s one of these rare strategies that signal both how smart you are, but also it makes us very likable. Another thing that I referred to in my previous answer was, when we talk about our journeys, we still convey a lot of competence. And we don’t lose the warmth. People still like us more and find us relatable.

What do I mean by that? When I say journey, we even have a definition of the journey. So we defined it as a long and often difficult process of going from one point to another. And basically when you share your journey, and we all had journeys, we all had long and difficult paths for something. And basically it reflects our determination to learn, how we learn a new skill and how we grow as a person. And I’m going to give you an example of that. And the tricky thing here, when we are in a job interview, when we are in a work happy hour, when we are in a reception where we try to network with people because we have limited time, we usually just list our accomplishments. So I did this, I did that, and it seems like a journey too, but it’s not really because we only list our outcomes, our accomplishments. But instead of saying, for instance, I graduated from this school, if I tell people, Oh, I actually started learning English at the age of 15 and I came to the U.S. as a college student. Now there’s a whole different story there. There’s a whole—and I’m sure all of us have lots of different things like that. So if you share—instead of just focusing on the outcome or accomplishment, if you can say just a couple more sentences, Oh, I had to work extra hours to get this position. Or I learned this language, or I learned this new skill, or I navigated all of that when I had my kid. All of these things give much more personal information and journey and how you made sense of your growth and development, and that’s way more interesting for the other party to listen to. So sharing journey information is another strategy that help us being both likable and respectable and get high ratings on both warmth and competence.

Oh, gratitude is a very good one I think. Although, I mean with LinkedIn posts gratitude, sometimes people also question the sincerity of gratitude posts as well, which is some research we are doing right now. But if gratitude has clear targets, instead of just saying, I’m grateful I got this job. If you say, I’m so grateful to my teammates, my mentors, if they’re actual people that you’re grateful to, people love, love gratitude, even if you brag. So that’s another strategy that makes the bragging a little warmer.

In general, I would recommend sharing brag attempts or accomplishments with positive emotion is very effective. People love it when we say, I’m really so excited. No, I’m genuinely over the moon for this graduation. Something like that. And one key thing I want to say, this is more about emotion research, not necessarily impression management research, but as an impression management researcher, I’m very interested in the study of pride. As I’ve mentioned, it’s a very interesting self-conscious emotion. So there are the researchers—pride researchers distinguish two distinct types of pride. One is hubristic pride, the other is authentic pride. So hubristic pride is all about I’m superior, I’m great. I’m just so great. You just get that vibe from hubristic pride. Whereas authentic pride is really all about, I work so hard, and finally I get this. And people really respond to that in a very positive way. So anytime we feel that emotion, that sweet pride, if we sort of check ourselves and say, I’m really being authentic about this. Do I really share all the background, all the hard work or the sleepless nights or extra hard work or extra hardship that I had to overcome to achieve this? Then people respond to it in a more positive way. And you don’t necessarily have the trade-off between warmth and competence. So these are just some of the strategies.

Mills: Are the rules different on social media? Because I mean, half of what I see on there is people saying, Oh, I’m in Budapest today and tomorrow I’m going to be in Croatia. Or, Here’s this beautiful meal that we had last night, and you had to eat at home and you probably ate leftovers. You know what I mean? That’s the sense that I get from reading a lot of the things that people I know post, and these are my friends. It’s not that I dislike them because they’re showing me that they’re doing something fabulous. But are the rules different for social media and are people’s reactions different?

Sezer: That’s a great question because we all know social media is bragging Olympics, and it’s very interesting. All of them became that way. At first maybe Instagram seemed like a very, everyone is having this amazing life filled with amazing meals, amazing trips, amazing hobbies. Sometimes when I see people’s hobbies, again, I’m very happy for them, but I always think, how did they find the time? I barely survive with just a few things I need to do given in a day. And LinkedIn has become that too. And LinkedIn also became, people share lots of things with their photos and about their personal lives too. I don’t know about your LinkedIn, but I started to see a lot of personal milestones. Maybe people don’t put a Paris trip to their LinkedIn, but they still do share a lot of personal life updates in a good way. I think social media has changed the game in a bit that it made it very visible and pervasive.

So it changed the norms. I think we think it’s more okay to brag now. So probably that’s why when I find my first tweet saying I like to cook, that seems very naive and kind of missing the point to me. The other thing is, of course, in general, the same rules apply. Gratitude is great if it’s done in a smart way and real way, rather than if you just say, I’m so humbled to be here. People don’t think you’re necessarily humble, right? People are actually a little aversive to some words. But in general, gratitude, positive emotions and directness—being a little more direct, like hundreds of hours of work and finally here I am. Something like that would be way more effective than humblebragging, saying, Oh, I don’t even know. I don’t even know that my students selected me for, I can’t believe I’m getting this teaching award again.

So generally the rules are the same in terms of people who never share things, who share only the accomplishments, I think that also backfires a little bit. I think the social media piece is very exciting for us researchers because now things are really changing. We see also the behavior differences between different generations. If you ever look at TikTok, the norms there are even more different because it’s a more video based app, and the younger generations, the Gen Z members make videos that are almost like, they even make fun of—I don’t know if you heard of this, but they even make fun of the millennial pause, which is this idea that when you put the camera, I think older generations starting with millennials, we do this thing where the camera starts, we do have this slight pause where you just pause and look at the camera and you’re ready.

Whereas for the Gen Z members, they start there, they start talking immediately—when they put on makeup or cook, and it’s like a normal thing. Oh, here’s a day, there’s a day at Harvard University as a freshman student, what do I do here? Because for them, they are much more concerned about the feeling of cringe, so they don’t even want to look like they’re trying. So that’s a term that we’re learning from social media as well. So generally, some rules are the same, meaning that you’ve got to be direct, you’ve got to show gratitude and hopefully talk about your authentic pride and journey, how you got there, your hard work and how you grow as a person, general rules of bragging work. But there are different norms because there are different generations coming along and they change the norms and we don’t want to seem like you’re trying too hard. That’s why even the number of words you put on your status on social media, some people argue that that may reveal your age. If you write this long paragraph, you are like an older millennial. Whereas if you sort of say just one sentence as if you’re not trying, that’s much more of a younger generation person’s attempt, attempt to self promote. So I find it fascinating that some rules are the same, but some rules are definitely changing there.

Mills: So I have to ask, because you mentioned it, and of course it’s elsewhere in your bio, in addition to your work as a researcher and a professor, you do standup comedy. Does your research and impression management help you in your comedy? I mean, do you work it into your routine?

Sezer: Yeah, absolutely. I do. It’s impossible not to. Well, first of all, in general, because I studied organizational behavior in grad school, so I’m very interested in behavioral science and what mistakes people make and how can we fix that. And in my research, I focus specifically on impression management mistakes. Comedy is also all about mistakes. If you go on stage and talk about how great things are, it’s not funny. It has to be—Mark Twain has this famous quote, there’s no humor in heaven, because everything is so great there. So in a way, comedy is impression management in real time because you’ve got to talk about these mistakes, but also to be funny, you’ve got to manage the impressions too, because there is a timing. You’ve got to be vulnerable. And the soft deprecation usually works as a comedian. And soft deprecation is an interesting impression management strategy as well, where you can cultivate a lot of warmth and likability points. My research makes me very meta aware of these dynamics, so I always experiment with impression management on stage. I should say, and these are two favorite topics of mine. I love talking about impression management and studying it, and I love comedy and I love thinking about what makes something funny and relatable. Sometimes I run experiments, sometimes I make a joke. And if people laugh, I know it’s real. And if my data works, I know it’s real.

Mills: Well, Dr. Sezer, I want to thank you for joining me today. You’ve made a great impression.

Sezer: Oh, thank you so much. You too.

Mills: We are a great team.

Sezer: Such a pleasure to join. Thanks a lot.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.