Agentic Virtue Signaling in Self-Promotion: The Causes and Consequences of Blended Signals of Dominance, Prestige, and Virtue

Abstract: Self-promotion, or highlighting achievements to enhance perceived competence, is essential for workplace advancement but often risks negative social evaluations. While incorporating communal virtues like humility can mitigate these effects, it may also undermine the desired competence perceptions. Drawing on the Moral Virtue Theory of Status Attainment (MVT), we propose downward temporal comparisons—highlighting progress over time—as a self-promotion strategy that enhances competence while also enhancing diligence, an agentic moral virtue. By comparing current performance to past performance, temporal comparisons emphasize growth while avoiding the observers' perceptions of dominance associated with self-promotive statements that incorporate downward social comparisons. Across three studies, we show that observers perceive temporal comparers as competent and diligent, while social comparers are dominant. These social perceptions in turn influence promotability judgments, with agentic moral virtues proving more effective in conjunction with competence than communal moral virtues like humility when self-promoting (i.e., “humblebragging”).

Keywords: self-promotion, morality, comparisons, promotability, agency, social rank