A theory linking thanking, apologizing, bragging, and blaming

What is it about?

In this paper, we provide a solution to the puzzle of why simple, everyday communications like thanking, apologizing, bragging, and blaming matter so much to people and can even have economic consequences. We propose that because these communications transfer responsibility from one person to another, not only do they have image-based benefits, but, more crucially, they have image-based costs: Each involves a tradeoff between appearing competent and appearing warm. Thanking and apologizing involve the speaker taking a hit to their own competence, but because they this simultaneously improves the other person's (target's) competence, they make the speaker look generous or nice. Bragging and blaming have the opposite impact: They involve boosting one's own competence at the cost of someone else's, which makes the speaker look selfish. These dynamics allow us to make many predictions about how these communications play out in conversations about responsibility, and how the affect behavior more generally. For example, we predict thanking will be more common than bragging and apologizing will be more common than blaming. Furthermore, people will engage in conversational strategies to make sure that happens, like giving the recipient of a favor the chance to thank before bragging, or going even further and "prompting" them to thank (e.g., "How did you like the feedback I gave on your paper?". We test these predictions in two studies, one of which involves live chat between pairs of individuals.

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Why is it important?

This paper is the first to link the communications of thanking, apologizing, bragging, and blaming in a unified framework. By doing this and by further providing insight into their underlying costs and benefits, it is the first theory to provide a systematic way of thinking about these communications and their dynamics and a foundation for generating hypotheses to be tested in future work.