Why do people brag?
The answer is extracted from an article titled"The Psychology of Bragging" published by Counselling
Connection, which is the official blog of the Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors,
which is an organization providing education in counseling.
According to this article, when people shared information about themselves, the same areas
of the brain activated as those that light up when we are eating food or having sex!
By the way, This article did not do a very good job revealing the source of this information
but I believe they are referring to research published in Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences in 2012 titled "Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding"
So here you go, people are bragging because it feels good, not surprising at all.
But I think the real question here is why they don't know they are annoying while they
are doing so?
Irene Scopelliti, a behavioral scientist, and her colleagues at the City University
of London exploring this issue in a 2015 research published in the journal Psychological Science
where they asked subjects to provide a profile about themselves.
Profile writers were asked to rate how interesting they believed their profiles would appear
to others.
Profile “raters”, on the other hand, then read the profiles and rated them on how interesting they were.
The findings showed that there was zero correlation between the profile providers’ predictions
and how much the raters did like the profiles.
The profile writer significantly overpredicts how interesting their profiles are in the
eyes of the others.
So your annoying relatives likely do not know how boring and annoying they are when they
are bragging, they might even be thinking they are sharing something very interesting
to you and you should appreciate it.
Isn't it scary?Hello, everyone!
This short video is part of the original What People Also Ask series, in which I preach
how to find useful information using Google's People Also Ask feature.
Every week, I make a video focusing on one specific entity with more in-depth content.
You can watch the entire episode using the link in the description or the end card on
the screen.
You can also subscribe if you enjoy my content.
Look forward to seeing you!