Pride in economic psychology

Abstract

This paper presents an economic-psychological analysis of the concept of pride. Although it was one of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins, pride has been regarded by psychology as a positive rather than a negative quality. It is usually viewed as an emotion elicited by one's own or others' achievement and associated with self-esteem and positive self-image. However, it is necessary to distinguish ‘proper pride’, associated with genuine achievements, and ‘false pride’ (vanity or conceit) which can be maladaptive or even pathological. Familiar social psychological processes such as self-serving bias are likely to give rise to false pride, which is in turn likely to lead to erroneous or apparently irrational decisions. It is at this point that pride has implications for economic behaviour. We examine the role of pride in three economic situations: in work, where pride may lead to a preference for doing high quality work; in relation to social security benefits, where pride may depress take-up; and in negotiations, where pride may lead to an ‘irrationally’ hard negotiating position. We argue that in all cases pride is involved because economic decisions are not taken in isolation from one another, but are linked together by the selfhood of the people who take them. Although pride can lead to decisions that are maladaptive from any perspective, in many cases it functions to ensure that people take decisions that are in their long-term interests, even when in the short term they would appear irrational. We conclude that economic analysis needs to take more account of the selfhood of economic agents, while the psychology of pride needs to take more account of economic behaviour.