There is evidence that sometimes people have a different self from what they feel and perceive. The clearest example, however, is not so much false pride as false modesty. There is a tendency to believe that false modesty allows one to highlight one’s own positive qualities, such as being competent, while at the same time allowing one to arouse sympathy, disguising one’s glories as complaints or professions of humility.
But in fact everything said above is not true. With this Psychology-Online article, we will discover what is false modesty in social psychologywhy it is used and what are the faces of false modesty.
What is false modesty?
It is commonly known that false modesty is the worst of pride. Specifically, false modesty is the ability to appear, falsely, shy while explaining how good we are. According to Freud, it is the specialization in “excusationes non petitae” (excusationes non richieste), which mean exactly what one wants to deny.
Modesty is different from humility, which is a creaturely virtue that makes man aware of his own finitude. On the other hand, if he asks you what false modesty is, it is actually a true deception, a close relative of proclaimed vainglory. In the following sections we tell you what false modesty means in different contexts of our lives.
Why is false modesty used?
Sometimes we wonder why false modesty is used. Perhaps at this moment someone occurs to you who, far from praising himself, denigrates or discredits himself. Are degrading attitudes can be subtly useful to promote being, as they often provoke feelings of tranquility. A false modesty trope might be telling a friend “I felt like an idiot” so that the friend consoles you by saying, “but no, you did it right.” Another example of false modesty would be “I wish I didn’t feel so unattractive” to lead to being told “come on, I know a lot of other people who are a lot less attractive than you.” Discover .
There is another reason why people denigrate themselves and praise others. Specifically, it is done to minimize and give little importance to its capacity. This allows them to reduce the pressure related to their performance and lower the initial reference point for performance evaluation.
An example of false modesty is sports coaches. Before the decisive match, they praise the strength of the opponents and highlight the weaknesses that their team needs to work on. Coaches convey an image of modesty and sportsmanship and set the stage for a favorable evaluation, regardless of the outcome. A victory becomes the achievement of a praiseworthy objective and a loss becomes an event attributable to the excellent defense of the adversaries. Modesty, as Bacone said, is nothing more than one of the “arts of ostentation“. Don’t miss this article if you want to know more about .
Superficial gratitude and the danger of overclassification
False modesty also appears in people’s autobiographical reports of their goals. To find out, Roy Baumeister and Stacey Ilko (1995) invited some students to write “an important success experience,” asking only a portion of them to sign their own name and prepare to read their own writing to others; these students often acknowledged the help or emotional support they had received. Those, on the other hand, who wrote anonymously only rarely mentioned their own gratitude, and more often painted themselves as the sole promoters of their own success. From these results, the researchers came up with the idea of superficial gratitude, that is, the one who seems humblewhile In the privacy of his own mind he only gives credit to himself.
Superficial gratitude can rise to the surface when we outperform those around us and feel uncomfortable about the feelings others may have toward us. If we perceive that our success could make others jealous or resentful – a phenomenon that Julia Exline and Marci Lobel (1999) define “the dangers of overclassification” – we can minimize our results and show gratitude. For superclassists, modest self-presentations are a natural gesture.
Thus, superficial gratitude and the danger of overclassification are phenomena that occur when a person feels above the rest, but does not want it to be noticed how proud he or she is of it.
The faces of false modesty
This phenomenon of false modesty can show itself in many ways. Next, we will see the faces of false modesty:
- The invisible: He is a gifted person, but he rejects all public recognition so as not to be envied. He acts like he’s “normal” and hides how good he is at what he does. His need is to take refuge from envy, whose destructiveness he fears, with the certainty that if he does not emerge into anything he will be loved and accepted. In others it produces the suspicion of being deceived and of not really knowing who is in front of you.
- The narcissist: goes out of his way to do one thing well and get a compliment. However, he rejects others, putting himself down in a big way, to induce others to say nice things to him. Your need is to obtain external confirmations. Let him be told: “Bravo, I approve of you, you are great.” He looks to others to convince him of his worth.
- The superstitious: denies any value or because you fear that recognizing it will bring bad luck and attract a negative event. His need is not to tempt because for him, for some reason, asserting yourself is equivalent to being punished. When he is with others he creates an atmosphere of imminence, superstition and precariousness that makes him disturbing.
- Discontent: He always sees the negative in what he does and only realizes what is missing. can never feel happy. Your need is to seek continuous goals so as not to stop and reflect, in an inappropriate perfectionism. Causes anger and in others. His silent “You don’t know what I could do” is self-centered and dismissive.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
- Myers, D. G. (2008). Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Pilutti, R. (2009). The presumption, the true and false modesty. Retrieved from: http://www.renatopilutti.it/2009/02/25/presunzione-modestia-vera-e-falsa/
- RIZA (2012). Not there false modesty. Retrieved from: https://www.riza.it/psicologia/l-aiuto-pratico/3092/no-alla-falsa-modestia.html