In cer­tain sit­u­a­tions boast­ing about one’s achieve­ments is a nec­es­sary evil (I’m British, OK?). It’s a del­i­cate thing to do cor­rectly and there are strate­gies to suc­cess­fully avoid the sit­u­a­tion com­pletely[1].

When you must brag, how­ever, research has shown in what cir­cum­stances a person’s boast­ing comes across as self-absorbed arro­gance and when it comes across as jus­ti­fied in the con­text of the conversation.

The crux of it: con­text is every­thing when it comes to boast­ing. If Avi’s friend raised the topic of the exams, Avi received favourable rat­ings in terms of his boast­ful­ness and like­abil­ity, regard­less of whether he was actu­ally asked what grade he got. By con­trast, if Avi raised the topic of the exams, but failed to pro­voke a ques­tion, then his like­abil­ity suf­fered and he was seen as more of a boaster.

In other words, to pull off a suc­cess­ful boast, you need it to be appro­pri­ate to the con­ver­sa­tion. If your friend, col­league, or date raises the topic, you can go ahead and pull a rel­e­vant boast in safety. Alter­na­tively, if you’re forced to turn the con­ver­sa­tion onto the required topic then you must suc­ceed in pro­vok­ing a ques­tion from your con­ver­sa­tion part­ner. If there’s no ques­tion and you raised the topic then any boast you make will leave you look­ing like a big-head.

How­ever, as noted at Mind Hacks, this study was con­ducted in Israel and there are obvi­ously going to be regional vari­a­tions:

I’ve infor­mally noticed that the social accept­abil­ity of ‘talk­ing one­self up’ varies greatly between coun­tries — from the USA, where mod­er­ate self-praise is stan­dard social cur­rency, to the UK, where it is only accept­able when fol­lowed by a self-deprecating com­ment or joke, to Swe­den where it is only accept­able when one is threat­ened by armed men or the future of the world hangs in the balance.

[1] Ben Cas­nocha sug­gests:

In a group set­ting with impres­sive peo­ple (con­fer­ence, din­ner party, etc) have a third per­son intro­duce each per­son instead of self-introductions. You can’t brag about your­self. A third party can.