New research suggests women strategically use modesty to avoid backlash from female peers

Women often navigate a difficult social landscape in the workplace, where promoting their own achievements can lead to negative social consequences. A new study shows that women anticipate this backlash and strategically use modesty to avoid being judged harshly by their peers. The findings were published in Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Women currently make up only a fraction of corporate leadership roles. One factor contributing to this stagnation is a reluctance to self-promote. Self-promotion involves highlighting personal achievements, abilities, and contributions to others. Because promotions often depend on visibility, individuals who actively self-promote are more likely to advance in their careers.

Women often encounter a backlash effect when they draw attention to their successes. Role congruity theory suggests that society holds specific expectations for how men and women should behave. Women are typically expected to be communal, cooperative, and modest. When a woman acts in an agentic or self-promoting manner, she violates these norms and often faces social penalties, such as being viewed as untrustworthy or unlikable.

These social penalties can be especially severe in interactions with other women. From an evolutionary perspective, human cognitive abilities evolved to help individuals navigate social networks. Historically, women often dispersed from their family groups and had to build alliances with non-relatives. Successfully managing these relationships required an understanding of social dynamics to secure coalition partners and resources.

Overt displays of superiority or ambition can threaten peers, sparking competition and risking the loss of these essential alliances. Researchers Krystal Duarte of Rutgers University, Jaimie Arona Krems of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Jennifer Byrd-Craven of Oklahoma State University designed an experiment to explore this dynamic. They wanted to know if women actively anticipate this backlash and adjust their behavior accordingly. The researchers focused on compliments, which serve as brief, everyday opportunities for self-promotion.

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To test how people judge responses to compliments, the team recruited 838 undergraduate students from a midwestern university. The participants read a short scenario in which they imagined giving a compliment to a same-sex peer. The compliment focused on either the person’s appearance, expertise, general niceness, or job success.

Participants then reviewed four possible ways the peer might respond. Two responses were immodest: boasting, such as agreeing that they are the best, and neutral acceptance, such as a simple thank you. The other two were modest responses. One involved reflecting the praise back to the compliment-giver, while the other involved deflecting the praise by attributing success to luck.

After reading the responses, participants rated the fictional peer on traits like arrogance, warmth, and friendliness using a 100-point scale. They also rated how much they believed the peer liked them and wanted to be friends with them. The results showed that all participants judged boasting negatively. However, women judged boasting same-sex targets much more harshly than men did.

When the fictional target boasted, women rated the person as far more arrogant and less warm than men did. Women also reported feeling that the boasting target liked them less and would not want to initiate a friendship. Reflecting the compliment back to the giver resulted in the most favorable evaluations across all traits for both men and women. Neutral acceptance fell in the middle, eliciting less negative reactions than boasting but fewer positive reactions than reflecting.

Deflecting the compliment, which the researchers initially categorized as a modest response, resulted in surprisingly negative evaluations. The team suspects that deflecting praise might be interpreted as rejecting the compliment-giver’s friendly intent. By failing to accept the compliment, the recipient may appear dismissive or unwilling to connect.

In a second experiment, the researchers investigated whether people anticipate these social judgments and change their behavior as a result. They recruited 505 undergraduate students who imagined receiving a compliment from a same-sex peer. The compliments in this experiment were restricted to either physical appearance or job success, representing two highly visible markers of status.

Participants indicated which of the four response types they would most likely use in that situation. They also rated how they expected the compliment-giver would judge them based on their chosen response. The goal was to see if women actively try to avoid the penalties observed in the first study. The data revealed a gender difference in preferred responses.

Women were much more likely than men to choose modest responses, particularly reflecting the compliment back to the giver. Men were more likely to select neutral acceptance or boasting than women were. When participants imagined how the other person would view them, women anticipated severe social penalties for immodest responses. Compared to men, women strongly expected that boasting would lead the other person to view them as arrogant, cold, and unlikable.

Women also expected that the compliment-giver would assume they had no desire to be friends. These anticipated penalties were sensitive to the context of the compliment. Women expected the harshest judgments when boasting about their physical appearance. The researchers note that physical appearance is closely tied to mate value and social comparison, making it a sensitive area for peer interactions.

The experiments utilized hypothetical written scenarios rather than live interactions. In actual face-to-face conversations, nonverbal cues like tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language heavily influence how a statement is received. A response that reads as boastful on paper might be interpreted as a joke if delivered with a smile. The study was also limited to same-sex interactions.

The social rules governing modesty and self-promotion often change in mixed-sex environments. Future research would need to examine whether women evaluate men differently than they evaluate other women in similar scenarios. Additionally, the participants were young adults living in the United States. Cultural norms surrounding modesty and self-enhancement vary widely around the world.

In many East Asian cultures, social norms place a much stronger emphasis on downplaying personal achievements compared to Western cultures. The negative interpretation of deflecting a compliment might be unique to a Western context. Despite these limitations, the research indicates that modesty is more than just a polite habit.

For many women, modesty functions as a strategic tool to manage relationships and avoid alienating peers. As modern workplaces increasingly reward assertiveness, women are forced to navigate a challenging line between advancing their careers and maintaining their social networks.

The study, “Strategic Modesty in Women’s Same-Gender Interactions: Response to Compliments and Anticipated Backlash,” was authored by Krystal Duarte, Jaimie Arona Krems, and Jennifer Byrd-Craven.