To Be Modest Or Self-enhancing?The Effectiveness Of Modesty In Self-Presentation

The term of modesty has existed in eastern culture for a very long time. It's also a traditional social rule in China. However, in the academic field the scientific research of modesty is still at an initial stage. Western researchers have dug deeper in the effectiveness of modesty and self-enhancement. Considering the difference of eastern countries and western countries that eastern people tend to be modest while western people tend to be self-enhancing, thus whether the research findings of western situations can be applied to China still need further test. Meanwhile, some research results show that the traditional social rule of modesty in China may be westernized. Some language psychologists first noticed that Chinese people's attitude to compliment has changed. In the traditional way,publicly accepting compliment was thought to be impolite because modesty is a very important part of Chinese etiquette. People were supposed to adapt the attitude of rejection or accept with amendment when they were praised(Gao et al., 1998). A study conducted by Spencer-Oatey and Ng(2002) revealed different findings in the twenty first century that Chinese people's attitudes to acceptance of compliment is more positive while their attitudes to rejection of compliment becomes more negative. With the development of market economy, the performance-oriented appraisal requires individuals to present their competency directly. Thus, whether the traditional self-presentation of modesty can adapt to the modern Chinese society need the academic attention. Based upon, this study was aimed to explore the effectiveness of modesty in China.This study explores the effectiveness of modesty based on the two dimensions of social recognition during social interaction: interpersonal attraction and competence perception. We also take into account that whether observers participate in the same task can influence the research findings. Experiment in this paper is a mix design which is 2(the level of modesty: low and high) ×2(the real competence of the actor: low and high)×2(whether the observer participates in the intelligence test: no or yes). The level of the actor's modesty and real competence are controlled in the material. Participants are recalled from a university in central China. The results show that:(1) modesty is still positively related to interpersonal attraction.(2)individual's real competence plays amoderating role between modesty and interpersonal attraction. Specifically, when individual's real competence is high, compared to people with low level of modesty people with high level of modesty are evaluated with higher interpersonal attraction.While the real competence is low, the positive association between modesty and interpersonal attraction disappears.(3) Modesty moderates the relationship between an individual's real competence and the perceived competence by observers. Specifically,when individual's real competence is high, the moderating role of modesty disappears.while individual's real competence is low, observers perceive the competence of individual with low level of modesty to be higher than individual with high level of modesty. This shows that the so-called heuristic social comparison does not exist in the real competence perception process of observers, and the modesty of Chinese people is more like a behavioral style to be polite, but not from the inner inside.