The Hubris Hypothesis: People Particularly Dislike Explicitly Comparative Braggers from Their Ingroup

Observers dislike explicit self-superiority claimants (asserting they are superior to others) relative to implicit self-superiority claimants (asserting they are good). The hubris hypothesis provides an explanation: Observers infer from an explicit (but not implicit) claim that the claimant views others, and therefore the observers, negatively. We provided a novel test of the hubris hypothesis by manipulating the claim’s relevance to the observers’ identity. A self-superiority claim may imply a particularly negative view of observers, if an ingroup claimant compares the self to the ingroup. We predicted that (1) observers would particularly dislike an explicit (vs. implicit) ingroup claimant, who compared the self to their ingroup, and (2) observers’ dislike for an explicit ingroup claimant would be due to the inference that the claimant held a negative view of them. Two experiments, involving minimal (N = 100) and natural (N = 114) groups, supported the predictions.