Extreme Modesty
Self effacing behavior is a common affliction of bright women, observes psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson. She points to research showing they sabotage themselves because they are particularly prone to erroneous beliefs about their own abilities. They regard their abilities as fixed and innate because as girls they were praised for being so smart.
The behavior is not an indictable offense. But as much as addiction or procrastination, it can be a self-made obstacle to achieving goals.
As a result, says Halvorson, they are quick to lose confidence.
"They grow up to be women too preoccupied with proving, to themselves and everybody else they have ability. When we fear our ability will be judged lacking we resort to self-sabotaging behaviors, like self-handicapping, self-effacement, opting out of challenging experiences."
The more a woman's ability is tied to her self-worth, the more behavior becomes self-sabotaging in the face of insecurity.
It's ironic, Halvorson notes. Being praised for smartness as girls, women feel pressured to continuously provide evidence for that smartness, which undermines performance. Looking for evidence of self-worth in the eyes of others,
"we just end up embarrassing ourselves and perpetuating the stereotype of women as weaker and less capable than men."
Under normal conditions, self-effacement is a facet of modesty and a tactic of impression management. It does not automatically imply a lack of confidence or of self-esteem. It commonly reflects cultural norms, in the collectivist cultures of China and Japan, modesty is considered a virtue. Self-effacing tactics reduce the social risk of offending others.
But Western cultures of individualism emphasize the need to present the self as unique and independent. Even so, men and women engage in self-enhancing strategies only among strangers, when we need to give unknown others a quick sense of who we are.
A psychologist says,
With strangers, it is appropriate and desirable to point out one's good traits because the information is otherwise unavailable and may figure centrally in how the audience judges the self presenter.
They find, in fact, this is our default mode, habitual and automatic ways of acting.
With friends there is the expectation of future interaction, we automatically lean to modesty and under-represent our positive traits. After all, friends know our finer points. We want to keep an affective bond.
Whatever its source, many researchers find modesty has one overriding cost. Self-effacing individuals cross culturally are generally better liked, but they are also seen as less competent than self enhancing folk. Observers consistently evaluate their performance on tasks less favorably. That's when it becomes self-defeating.
"There is an absolutely corrosive false modesty associated with femininity," says Regina Barreca,
"It calls attention to itself by saying, 'I'm the last one, I should really let someone else go.' But it also says, 'Look at me. I'm just a girl doing this.'"
We do this to ourselves, we mark ourselves different from the rest of humanity by calling attention to our gender preemptively asking for special treatment.
Barreca notes it's bad enough that women incur harm from such behavior because traditional thinking still equates femininity with inability, extreme modesty spurs judgments of diminished competence. But the damage is compounded in individualistic societies because self-effacement fuels the negative stereotype that women are prone to use their sex to gain advantage. All self-defeating behavior harms the doer. It's a unique form of self-sabotage that can weaken a whole gender.
Psychology Today
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