Effects of public and private expectancies on attributions of competence and interpersonal attraction1

Self-Presentational Responses to Success in the Organization: The Costs and Benefits of Modesty

“…As in previous research (Brickman & Seligman, 1974;Schlenker & Leary, 1982;Tetlock, 1980), self-presenters who responded in a boastful fashion (low modesty) were universally responded to more negatively than were moderately or highly modest self-presenters. This was the case regardless of the gender of the participant, the gender of the self-presenter, or the role of the evaluator.…”

“…Three studies have examined multiple levels of modesty (Brickman & Seligman, 1974;Schlenker & Leary, 1982;Tetlock, 1980). Tetlock (1980) found that teachers who made moderately modest attributions for their students' performance were preferred to both highly modest and boastful teachers.…”

Attributional self‐presentation and information available to the audience

“…Tetlock (1981) demonstrated that verbal accounts provided by the actors positively affect judges' ratings of actors featuring in desirable or undesirable events. Brickman and Seligman (1974) found that subjects rated an actor more favourably when his publicly expressed performance expectation was in agreement with (what was said to be) his private expectation. Furthermore, it was shown that an actor was liked better when his expectation matched his subsequent performance than when it did not.…”

“…Secondly, a strongly self-serving attribution in a situation in which the audience already knows that the subject is competent, might decrease the audience's impression of the subject's likeability (cf. Brickman and Seligman, 1974;Schlenker and Leary, 1982). In view of these arguments, the conclusion that informational constraints should reduce self-serving attributions in low as well as high test performance conditions seems to be warranted.…”

“…In fact, an audience does evaluate actors as a joint function of their verbal self-reports and additional factual information (cf. Brickman and Seligman, 1974;Tetlock, 1981;Schlenker and Leary, 1982). Tetlock (1981) demonstrated that verbal accounts provided by the actors positively affect judges' ratings of actors featuring in desirable or undesirable events.…”