Dual-promotion: Bragging better by promoting peers.

Abstract

To create favorable impressions and receive credit, individuals need to share information about their past accomplishments. Broadcasting one's past accomplishments or claiming credit to demonstrate competence, however, can harm perceptions of warmth and likability. In fact, prior work has conceptualized self-promotion as a hydraulic challenge: tactics that boost perceptions along one dimension (e.g., competence) harm perceptions along other dimensions (e.g., warmth). In this work, we identify a novel approach to self-promotion: We show that by combining self-promotion with other-promotion (complimenting or giving credit to others), which we term "dual-promotion," individuals can project both warmth and competence to make better impressions on observers than they do by only self-promoting. In seven preregistered studies, including analyses of annual reports from members of Congress and experiments using social network, workplace, and political contexts (total N = 1,448), we show that individuals who engage in dual-promotion create more favorable impressions of warmth and competence than those who only engage in self-promotion. The beneficial effects of dual-promotion are robust to both competitive and noncompetitive contexts and extend to behavioral intentions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).