Impression management attenuates the effect of ability on trust in economic exchange
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118548119
Are competent actors still trusted when they promote themselves? The answer to this question could have far-reaching implications for understanding trust production in a variety of economic exchange settings in which ability and impression management play vital roles, from succeeding in one’s job to excelling in the sales of goods and services.
Much social science research assumes an unconditional positive impact of an actor’s ability on the trust placed in that actor: in other words, competence breeds trust. In this report, however, we challenge this assumption.
Across a series of experiments, we manipulated both the ability and the self-promotion of a trustee and measured the level of trust received. Employing both online laboratory studies (n = 5,606) and a field experiment (n = 101,520), we find that impression management tactics (i.e., self-promotion and intimidation) can substantially backfire, at least for those with high ability.
An explanation for this effect is encapsuled in attribution theory, which argues that capable actors are held to higher standards in terms of how kind and honest they are expected to be. Consistent with our social attribution account, mediation analyses show that competence combined with self-promotion decreases the trustee’s perceived benevolence and integrity and, in turn, the level of trust placed in that actor.
Study 3: Self-Promotion Lowers Unique Click-Through Rate on Social Media
The objective of study 3 was to increase external validity in the testing of our hypothesis that self-promotion disproportionally hurts competent actors by conducting an online field experiment on a global social media platform (86). Specifically, we ran an advertisement on Facebook promoting a new coffee machine from a coffee gear website. The advertisement encouraged users to click on the advertisement link in order to buy the new coffee machine now. Clicking on the advertisement serves as an adequate behavioral measure of trust because: 1) the adoption of a new product from an internet seller requires some degree of trust in the remote merchant (87); 2) clicking on a social media ad makes participants vulnerable to potential data security threats, which are known to be a problem on social media platforms (88, 89); and 3) our call to action to “shop now”—unlike other calls to action (e.g., “learn more” or “contact us”)—reflects concrete purchase intentions (90). These three points are in line with the common definition of trust, which states that people trust others when they demonstrate the willingness to make themselves vulnerable to the actions of those others (1).
As predicted, the advertisement featuring the self-promoting website generated a lower unique click-through rate (0.056%) compared to the one featuring the nonself-promoting website [0.091%; χ2(1) = 3.989; n = 101,520; P = 0.046, 95% CI for odds ratio = (0.390, 0.995)]
Third, because ability is closely tied to prestige (107, 108), our article also has implications for the literature on status. There is an ongoing debate on whether high-status (vs. low-status) actors tend to receive more favorable treatment (109). The traditional view, popularized by research on the Matthew effect (110), suggests that status comes with a variety of benefits for those who possess it (111). However, recent scholarship points to the possibility of status liabilities, such as when high-status actors are held to higher standards and thus are judged more harshly (112). Our investigation offers support for both positions. Ceteris paribus, highly able partners enjoy the advantage of superior trustworthiness assessments and consequently greater trust being placed in them; at the same time, however, our findings suggest that transgressions of social norms are punished to a greater extent when the deviant is high in ability. Our article thus contributes to the development of a more nuanced understanding of status benefits and liabilities (53) and serves as a springboard for future research uncovering contingencies other than impression management, ranging from relationship tenure to power differences between trustor and trustee to the specific type of norm violation.
Fourth, our findings inform research on impression management. Today’s meritocratic society appears to incentivize people to proactively present themselves and their competencies in the best possible light (113). Aggressively self-promoting one’s strengths is often portrayed as a sine qua non in the quest for successful social and economic exchange in this type of environment (114). The viewpoint that actors engaging in self-promotion will fare better than those who do not appears to be widely accepted, especially within popular discourse, to the extent that practical guidelines for overcoming modesty concerns in favor of blatant bragging are hitting best seller lists (e.g., refs. 115 and 116). However, our empirical findings provide little support for this apparent enthusiasm surrounding self-promotion. Our studies point to a negative main effect on trust, lending further credence to more cautious scholarly assessments of the merits of self-promotion (37, 40). Interpreting our focal interaction term from a different perspective, we offer competence as an important boundary condition to the effectiveness of self-promotion (as well as intimidation). Clearly, more work is needed to understand the contingent effects of impression management techniques on a variety of outcomes (117) before any well-grounded practical recommendations for or against the use of impression management can be made.