How pride works.

Daniel Sznycer,Adam Scott Cohen

doi:10.1017/ehs.2021.6

Abstract

The emotion of pride appears to be a neurocognitive guidance system to capitalize on opportunities to become more highly valued and respected by others. Whereas the inputs and the outputs of pride are relatively well understood, little is known about how the pride system matches inputs to outputs. How does pride work? Here we evaluate the hypothesis that pride magnitude matches the various outputs it controls to the present activating conditions - the precise degree to which others would value the focal individual if the individual achieved a particular achievement. Operating in this manner would allow the pride system to balance the competing demands of effectiveness and economy, to avoid the dual costs of under-deploying and over-deploying its outputs. To test this hypothesis, we measured people's responses regarding each of 25 socially valued traits. We observed the predicted magnitude matchings. The intensities of the pride feeling and of various motivations of pride (communicating the achievement, demanding better treatment, investing in the valued trait and pursuing new challenges) vary in proportion: (a) to one another; and (b) to the degree to which audiences value each achievement. These patterns of magnitude matching were observed both within and between the USA and India. These findings suggest that pride works cost-effectively, promoting the pursuit of achievements and facilitating the gains from others' valuations that make those achievements worth pursuing.

Highlights

Being valued by other people is a key resource for humans (Baumeister & Leary, 1995)
To measure agreement among raters about the relative extent to which they would value a target individual if 25 acts and traits were true of that individual we computed intra-class correlations (ICC) in each country
Do participants within countries agree on the degree to which they would experience one of the five pride responses if the acts and traits described in the scenarios were true of them? In the USA there was widespread agreement about the relative intensities of pride responses that the 25 situations would elicit: pride feeling, ICC (2,36) = 0.94; communicate event, ICC (2,36) = 0.93; demand better treatment, ICC (2,35) = 0.80; invest in valued trait, ICC (2,35) = 0.95; pursue new challenges, ICC (2,33) = 0.90, P < 0.001

Summary

Introduction

Being valued by other people is a key resource for humans (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). When other people (an audience) detect new information about a target individual revealing that their valuations of the target individual are outdated, others appear to recalibrate how much they value the target, up or down, with correspondingly positive or negative effects on the target’s welfare and fitness (Tooby et al, 2008; Sznycer, 2019) This may have selected, at the individual’s end, for motivational systems to pursue socially valued courses of action and to cultivate socially valued characteristics, to refrain from pursuing socially disvalued courses of action (or, when those are personally profitable, to pursue them when circumstances are auspicious), to advertise reputation-enhancing information and to conceal reputation-damaging information (Leary & Kowalski, 1990). This constitutes an advertisement–recalibration theory of pride (Sznycer et al, 2017, 2018b; Sznycer, 2019; Durkee et al, 2019; Cohen et al, 2020; see : Tracy et al, 2010; Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008; Fessler, 1999; Weisfeld & Dillon, 2012)

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Conclusion