来源：《今日心理学》
原文刊登日期：2021年1月5日
Boasters are nasty—and to avoid looking like one, people often refrain from sharing their successes with those around them. But recent research suggests that hiding one’s wins may come with significant social costs.
自吹自擂者令人讨厌——为了避免看起来像自吹自擂者，人们经常避免与周围的人分享他们的成功。但最近的研究表明，隐藏自己的成就可能会带来重大的社会代价。
In the first of eight studies, 82 percent of participants reported hiding a success from a loved one, coworker, or stranger, often out of a desire to avoid boasting. But how did others feel when someone hid a success from them? In subsequent studies, people tended to feel more insulted and patronized by someone who, they learned, had withheld an achievement—such as a college acceptance—compared with someone who shared it. And secrecy came with relational consequences: Those who had a success hidden from them, rather than shared, felt less close to the secret-keepers and were less inclined to trust or collaborate with them.
在八项研究的第一项中，82%的参与者向亲人、同事或陌生人隐瞒成功，通常是为了避免自夸。但是别人被隐瞒成功时，他们是什么感觉呢？在随后的研究中，人们发现，与分享成就的人相比，那些隐瞒成就(比如大学录取)的人更容易让人感到受到侮辱和居高逼人。保密还会带来相关后果：那些隐瞒而不是与他人分享成功的人，会让人感觉不太亲近，别人也不太愿意信任他们或与他们合作。
Hiders feared that sharing would trigger envy; they weren’t wrong. But envy often coincided with greater happiness for the communicator. “People underestimate the extent to which others experience mixed emotions, such as envy and closeness,” says the lead author Annabelle Roberts, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student. Such miscalculations could do more harm than envy alone.
隐藏者担心分享会引发嫉妒；他们没有错。但对于交流者来说，嫉妒往往伴随着更大的幸福。“人们低估了其他人经历复杂情绪的程度，比如嫉妒和亲密，”该研究的主要作者、芝加哥大学博士生安娜贝尔·罗伯茨说。这种误判造成的伤害可能比嫉妒还要大。
Is it OK, at least, to conceal one’s failures? A second paper suggests that this too may be costly. In five studies, participants were significantly less likely to share failures with others than they were to share successes or neutral outcomes, in both in-lab experiments and when recalling real professional experiences.
那么，隐瞒自己的失败可以吗？另一篇论文指出，这也可能代价高昂。在五项研究中，无论是在实验室实验中，还是在回忆真实的职业经历时，参与者与他人分享失败的可能性都明显低于分享成功或中性结果的可能性。
This reluctance to share appeared to be due to participants’ overlooking the valuable information that can be got from failure. Even when in-lab experiments were specifically designed so that admitting failure was objectively more helpful to other participants than sharing success, they were still less likely to confess to slip-ups. However, deliberately highlighting the lessons that can be extracted from failure by both oneself and others—like information on how to win a game, for example—made participants more willing to share.
这种不愿分享的态度似乎是由于实验参与者忽视了可以从失败中获得的有价值的信息。即使实验室实验是专门设计的，客观上承认失败比分享成功对其他参与者更有帮助，他们仍然不太可能承认错误。然而，刻意强调自己和他人都能从失败中吸取的教训——比如如何赢得一场比赛的信息——会让参与者更愿意分享。
“Failure stings, so we don’t want to think about it,” says study author Ayelet Fishbach, also of the University of Chicago. But if you don’t stop to think about something, she notes, it’s hard to extract important information from it.
“失败让人刺痛，所以我们不想去想它，”同样来自芝加哥大学的研究作者Fishbach说。但她指出，如果你不停下来思考，就很难从中提取重要信息。
Reframing failure may help someone see its value. “If you take it as an indication that you are a failure,” she says, it may be too painful to examine and learn from. “But if you think about failure simply as a setback, then you’re likely to say, ‘What can I do differently?’”
重新审视失败可能有助于人们看到它的价值。她说：“如果你认为这表明你是一个失败者，那就太痛苦了，无法从中审视和学习。但如果你认为失败只是一种挫折，那么你可能会说，‘我能做些什么不同的事？’”