Since working systems are increasingly uncertain and competitive, people tend to adopt necessary persuasive arguments to show themselves better than others, especially for salesmen and interviewers. Activated by self-superiority belief and self-enhancement motivation, self-bragging commonly occurs in normal life. People do so in order to achieve positive image management. In the process of advice presentation, People are likely to brag themselves to endeavor for trust and identity from others, and thus make their advice endorsed. Deriving from the hubris hypothesis, different types and content of bragging may lead to different outcomes during advice taking process. We expect that decision makers favour an implicit braggart (who claims to be “good”) or a warmth braggart as compared to an explicit braggart (who claims to be “better than others”) or a competence braggart, respectively, and therefore differentiate their level of advice taking. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of self-bragging types and content on advice-taking, and the mediator role of decision makers’ liking towards advice presenter.

Two experiments were designed to explore the influence of self-bragging types and content on people’s advice-taking by a classical paradigm. The decision task was to estimate the number of coins in a glass. Pre-experiment was designed to confirm the effectiveness of self-bragging manipulations and test the appropriate advice given in the latter experiment. In the formal experiment, a 2 (bragging type: implicit vs explicit) x 2 (bragging content: warmth vs competence) between-subjects design was conducted to explore the influence of self-bragging type and content on advice taking, and the mediator role of decision maker’s liking towards advice presenter. There were 80 college students who took part in the pre-experiment and 144 college students who took part in the formal experiment. The dependent variable was the level of advice-taking, which was calculated by the formula of WOA (weight of advice).

The statistical result showed that compared with implicit bragging, decision makers took less advice from advice presenters of explicit bragging ; Compared with warmth braggarts, the level of advice taking was lower when advice presenters were competence braggarts. The relationship between types of bragging, content of bragging on advice taking was mediated by decision maker’s liking toward advice presenters, which indicated that an implicit braggarts (vs explicit braggarts ) or a warmth braggarts (vs competence braggarts ) was more likeable, and hence raised the level of advice taking. The present study mainly contributes to literatures on antecedents of advice taking by showing that different types and content of self-bragging for advice presenters may function. In addition, this study differentiates 2 dimensions (i.e. types and content) of self-bragging and indicates the potential negative effect of explicit and competence bragging within social interactions. Therefore, if practitioners want others to take their recommendations, they can present their virtue, merits and warmth to leave positive image. However, it is unadvisable to praise themselves by showing self-superiority compared with others or to make much display of their own competence.