Is Telling the World of Your Success Worth Five Times Your Private Knowledge of It?

The difficulties of study design in a braggy culture where few readily admit to bragging

Is your financial success more valuable to you if people know about it? Your fabulous grades in college? 

Social media posts would suggest modern humans care an awful lot about others knowing of their success — not to mention all the swell and expensive places they vacation. But for researchers trying to confirm and quantify this, how to get an honest answer from subjects once the topic is seriously introduced?

Subjects often respond to survey questions about their preferences with what they think is the right answer, rather than with their true feelings. For example, vanity and greed, characteristics that might be associated with someone who desires to be smarter or richer than others, are not particularly attractive in polite society. Researchers believe the very human desire to be seen as a good person sometimes leads subjects to disguise these preferences when answering straightforward survey questions.

In a working paper, Cornell’s Nicolas Bottan, Simon Fraser University’s Hitoshi Shigeoka, UCLA Anderson’s Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Kindai University’s Kasunori Yamada aim to overcome this problem, and uncover subjects’ actual personal preferences, by asking them individually to guess “the majority response” to survey questions. In the belief that, in speaking for others, one reveals one’s own preferences. The 4,934 U.S. survey subjects were collected over the data platform Dynata with the aim of mirroring the U.S. population in age and gender. They were offered a cash incentive for “accurately predicting” how other participants would answer questions.

Paycheck, Report Card, Volvo

The researchers designed surveys aimed at uncovering how much people value public versus private knowledge of their accomplishments in three areas: money, school grades and the safety ratings on their cars.

As a reality check, a control group wasn’t given the shelter of answering for other people. Many control group respondents said they would rather be seen as poorer than others, possibly as a display of humility that society supposedly appreciates. 

Most of the subjects answering for “the majority,” indicated, by implication, that they would want to make more money than peers, and they’d want the peers to know they had it. Subjects’ answers suggested they gained more satisfaction from their accomplishments and good traits when others knew about them. On average, they were willing to trade a little bit less real success for the perception among others that they had more.

The survey questions were set up as trade-offs revolving around very specific circumstances, such as varying dollar amounts that they would or wouldn’t trade of their own income and the average peer income. Particularly within income questions, there appeared a wide range of opinions on the relative worth of public/private success.

The researchers note several caveats and conundrums around the study. Participants’ answers varied a lot. Some subjects, for example, even under cover of speaking for others, indicated they’d give up a little of their own income to increase average peer income. A noticeable minority said most people would prefer to be seen as poorer than peers.

Averaged out, however, the subjects indicated that they cared much more about publicly besting their peers than merely attaining success. “Self image (quiet success) is at most 19.3% as important as social image,” the researchers estimate. Put another way, spreading word of one’s success is five times as valuable as quietly reflecting upon it.

People take particular pride in, and want to share, their good grades in school, the subjects’ survey answers suggest. On average, they’d trade a one-point reduction — take a B for an A — in their actual grade for a 1-point increase in the grade others thought they made.

The reputation edge of owning a safer car than others didn’t appear to be nearly as satisfying but seemed a little better than the good feeling that might come with just owning one.