Abstract
A total of 272 students at a German university were asked to write down the story of an ingratiation attempt they had made and one they had received. They were then asked to reflect on each episode via a questionnaire. All but one participant reported that they had performed at least one of the four tactics postulated in Jones’s ingratiation theory: compliments, favor-doing, opinion conformity, and positive self-presentation. In the case of received ingratiation, we found higher success ratings for nondependent (vs. dependent) partners, for just-being-friendly (vs. attraction-seeking) as the attributed motive, and for honest (vs. nonhonest) compliments and self-presentation. Female senders reported more success than did males (interpretable through existing research on gender differences). Finally, success levels were higher in the sender than in the receiver condition. Thus with our new autobiographical method we have extended the validity of three known determinants of the success of ingratiation attempts and discovered two “novel” factors deserving further research.
Keywords
Introduction
Ingratiation refers to behavior that is covertly aimed at enhancing one’s attractiveness and at obtaining favorable behavior. Jones (1964), the pioneer of ingratiation theory and research, has postulated four main types of behavior (or tactics) constituting ingratiation: compliments (communication reflecting positively on the recipient), favors (pro-social behavior vis-à-vis the recipient), opinion conformity, and self-presentation (in particular, self-enhancement). Regarding the two covert (“ulterior”) motives, Jones’s emphasis was on attraction-seeking. A recent example involving the other motive, favor-seeking, comes from a field experiment by Guéguen, Fischer-Lokou, and Lamy (2013): Young men were more likely to receive agreement to a date request with a young woman when they had earlier voiced a compliment on her physical appearance (also see the research by Seiter and coworkers, e.g., Seiter & Weger, 2010).
The primary goal of the present investigation was to study some determinants (or correlates) of the success of ingratiation attempts. For this, we used a new “narrative/quantitative” approach: Participants were asked to write down the story of an episode in their lives where they attempted to ingratiate themselves with another person, and/or one where they were the recipient of an ingratiation attempt. After this, they were asked to fill in a brief questionnaire containing the independent and dependent variables of the study.
A large body of research exists on the incidence and the success of ingratiation attempts. Gordon (1996) has provided a very useful review article. In the present paper, we will sometimes refer to his summary assessments of research evidence so we will not have to specify the studies he reviewed.
For a theoretical basis, we need a model of how a recipient processes and experiences the information contained in ingratiating behavior. We assume that she/he checks it for sincerity (i.e., whether there might be ulterior motives). Also, we assume that she/he checks whether the sender is being honest (i.e., believes what she/he says) and whether the latter’s statements are factually true. Whether and when these appraisals actually take place—and are perhaps elicited automatically—depend on a multitude of conditions (cf. Gordon, 1996). The basic causal assumption providing the rationales for our specific hypotheses is that if a person B’s behavior induces positivity (in affect and/or cognition) in person A then this is apt to enhance A’s attraction and behavioral intentions toward B. Any conditions which add negative elements are likely to decrease or even reverse the above causal connection.
Ulterior motives
Much research has been devoted to the hypothesis that the more transparent the ingratiating behavior the less successful will it be (e.g., the less likely will be a gain in attractiveness). Gordon (1996), who uses “transparency” to denote perceived ulterior motives in his review article, has assembled relevant evidence (pp. 65–66). Our study, by virtue of its special method, may add further validity to the transparency hypothesis.
Honestness
Compliments, positive self-presentation, and opinion conformity may be assessed by the receiver as to their honestness, a lack of which is apt to add a negative trace to any positive feelings engendered. This could counteract any increase in attraction and altruistic leanings on the recipient’s part.
We use the concept of honestness to denote (the perception) that the sender believes what she/he says. This is not identical with the “credibility” of a statement as the latter can be inaccurate (factually incorrect) and still be honest. In the study by Drachman, DeCarufel, and Insko (1978), participants received personal evaluations (performance feedback whose accuracy was varied experimentally) from a confederate. No effect of the accuracy of positive evaluations (i.e., compliments) was found.
Dependency status
The proposition here is that an ingratiator will be less successful if she/he is socially dependent on the other than in the reverse case or in the case of equal dependence. This factor has received considerable attention in previous research (see Gordon, 1996, pp.56 ff.). Our study can contribute to the empirical validity of the above proposition.
Further factors
We assessed some further features that may affect the success of an ingratiation attempt. One of them is the type of behavior (or tactic). Since our data-collection schedule does not allow for the necessary comparisons, we do not deal with it here. Further, we had no prior hypotheses regarding the sex of the participants and regarding the self-other comparison (i.e., whether the participant was the sender or the receiver), so we will provide relevant discussion when interpreting the findings.
Method
Participants
The sample (N = 272) comprised for the most part education students and a few psychology students at a large university located in a major German city. Their ages ranged from 19 to 67 years (M = 24.30, SD = 6.16). Eighty-one percent of them were women.
Procedure and materials
Participants were given several pages containing German text. The first page contained the instructions for them to report two attempts at ingratiation: “When I tried to ingratiate myself with someone” and (on the other half of the page) “When someone tried to ingratiate her-/himself with me.” In German: “Wie ich einmal versuchte, mich bei jemandem einzuschmeicheln” and “Wie einmal jemand versuchte, sich bei mir einzuschmeicheln”. (Fifteen of the stories have been published in Lamm, 2016.) About half of the instruction sheets involved the reverse order. The remaining pages contained two questionnaires, one for each episode. (In the first few sessions of data collection participants were given only version—own or other’s ingratiation attempt—to work on. The majority of participants—later—received both versions. Statistically, questionnaires in the two conditions—“self” and “other”—were all treated as “independent samples.”)
Anonymous data collection took place at an early session of the author’s college courses on interpersonal attraction and on interpersonal influence. The students were told that their biographical stories might prove helpful later in the course when ingratiation would be the topic. They were also told that the data from the questionnaires might be used for a publication years later. Participation in these courses was nonobligatory; course credit (pass or fail) was given for oral presentations, written papers, and/or final essay exams. Many students attended without wanting a course credit.
Measurements
Tactics
Participants were first asked to indicate whether any of the following behaviors occurred in the episode: compliments, favor-giving, conformity, self-enhancement, and/or other behavior. Multiple answers were allowed.
Dependency status
The second question called for indicating which of the two persons involved was more dependent on the other, considering their relationship as a whole.
Attribution of motives
In the third question, participants were to indicate their purposes for the above behaviors (in the “self” version) or estimate the other’s purposes (in the “other” version): Wanted to become (more) attractive, wanted to increase one’s chances for future positive treatment, just wanted to be nice (in German: wollte einfach nett sein), and/or any other purposes. Multiple answers were allowed.
Estimate of fulfilment of purposes
In the fourth question, participants were asked whether the above purposes were attained.
The fifth question differed according to version:
Moral inhibitions
In the “self” version, participants were asked whether they had to overcome inhibitions when performing the behavior(s).
Reflecting about the other’s purposes
In the “other” version, the question was whether participants had given any thought as to whether the sender’s statements in behaviors 1, 3, and/or 4 were honest (given that these had in fact occurred).
Estimate of honestness
In question 6, participants were asked to indicate whether the sender was honest, that is, whether she/he believed what she/he said.
Success of the ingratiation attempt
In question 7, participants indicated on a seven-point scale whether the attempt at ingratiation was successful (from “not at all successful” to “clearly successful;” in German: from “überhaupt nicht erfolgreich” to “eindeutig erfolgreich”).
Results and discussion
Frequencies and means.
Note: N = 272.
Percentage (and number) of participants who acknowledged only this one type of behavior or this one type of purpose.
Frequencies of tactics and purposes
Tactics
All participants—except one—reported at least one tactic. The frequencies in the “self” and the “other” conditions were 68% and 76% for compliments, 75% and 70% for favors, 48% and 60% for opinion conformity, 74% and 73% for self-enhancement, and 10% and 10% for additional behaviors.
Purposes
Attraction-seeking and favor-seeking were each reported by about two-thirds of the participants, in both the “self” and the “other” samples. Only 7% and 5%, respectively, reported none of the two purposes. Also, it may be noted that exclusive mentions of favor-seeking are no less frequent than of attraction-seeking. (In fact, the numbers are more than twice as high for favor-seeking.) These results support our inclusion of favor-seeking in the definition of ingratiation.
The above data show that Jones’s definition of ingratiation very closely reflects the layperson’s definition (at least in German).
Determinants of success 1: Expected findings
We used t tests for independent samples where this was possible. We will attend primarily to the statistically significant factors: attributed motive, honestness, and dependency status—all involving the “other” condition.
Ulterior motives
Of the three purposes (or motives) assessed in the questionnaire, we consider attraction-seeking and favor-seeking as ulterior ones insofar as they are covert; they may be called “manipulative.” In contrast, “just being nice” denotes the sender’s wish to behave in a way that is pleasant to the receiver; the purpose here is immanent to the behavior. In line with the transparency hypothesis, we found, in the “other” condition, lower success levels for attraction-seeking than for “just being nice” (t (24) = 2.88, p < .01, d = 1.18) (attraction-seeking: M = 3.00; 95% CI [1.88, 4.12]; just being nice: M = 5.30; 95% CI [4.04, 6.56]). Here, we included only those participants who checked just one of the purposes (“exclusive responses”). Thus, we have added to the evidence that one feels more ingratiated when she/he does not see attraction-seeking as the purpose behind the positive messages coming from a sender.
Honestness
For three tactics not including favor-doing, we compared the honest with the nonhonest cases with regard to success and found, in the “other” condition, that compliments and positive self-presentation were more successful when they were rated as honest (t (102.984) = 2.34, p = .02, d = .46; and t (70.958) = 2.56, p = .01, d = .61; respectively) (compliments honest: M = 3.96; 95% CI [3.07, 4.86]; nonhonest: M = 3.03; 95% CI [2.36, 3.70]) (self-presentation honest: M = 3.81; 95% CI [3.05, 4.57]; nonhonest: M = 3.04; 95% CI [2.23, 3.85]).
Dependency status
Note first that in the large majority of cases, the ingratiation attempt came from a dependent (58% and 66% in the “self” and “other” versions) or from an equal-status counterpart (38% and 29%); only 5% came from a superior counterpart. While keeping in mind our special method (recalling one case of ingratiation per version), this points to a generally greater incidence of ingratiation on the part of persons who are overall dependent on the other. Thus, because of the low number of “superior” cases, our data hardly permit testing the proposition that the “dependent” position is detrimental to the success of an ingratiation attempt. In the “other” sample, we did find lower success ratings in the dependent than in the superior condition (4.78 vs. 3.24). This is significant at p = .03, d = .71 (by way of pairwise comparison within an ANOVA). But the preconditions for this parametric test are not given. To perform a nonparametric test, we converted the seven-point scale into two categories: successful yes or no (renouncing the ratings at the neutral field). When the sender was the dependent one, there were 76 failures and only 36 successes; when he or she was the superior one, there were three failures and six successes. A χ2 test after Pearson was significant (p = .02, df = 2, Cramér’s V = .218). Because of our “weak” results, we can merely conclude that our data are suggestive in the direction of the established position that being dependent on the target person constitutes a handicap for an ingratiator.
Determinants of success 2: Two unexpected findings
Sex of the participants
In the “self” sample, we found higher success ratings for women than for men (t (185) = 2.25, p = .03, d = .44) (women: M = 5.41; 95% CI [5.16, 5.66]; men: M = 4.73; 95% CI [4.17, 5.30]). For interpreting this sex difference, we draw on social cognitive learning theory (Bussey & Bandura, 1999), assuming that—through operant conditioning and learning from models—girls, more than boys, acquire efficacy in interpersonal relating (in contrast to action and achievement) including indirect tactics of interpersonal influence. For example, as Alfermann (1996) summarizes empirical research on nonverbal communication, women look more, smile more, and show more expression intensity. These behaviors are apt to support (or even constitute) attempts at ingratiation.
The information as to whether one’s ingratiation attempt has been successful is only partially accessible: whether the other has come to like one more following the behavior can only be inferred (e.g., from nonverbal clues) or assumed by the ingratiator. Such an assumption may be based on women’s higher self-esteem in the realm of “behavioral conduct” (as reported by Gentile et al., 2009, in their meta-analysis).
Thus, we have adduced two complementary explanations for women’s higher success judgments, the first involving women’s “superiority” in actual conduct and the second involving women’s higher self-esteem grounds for believing to have been successful.
Self-other comparison
Another serendipitous finding is the considerably higher success level in the “self” than in the “other” sample (t(183) = 11.31, p < .001, d = 1.07) (self: M = 5.07; 95% CI [4.76, 5.382]; other: M = 3.20; 95% CI [2.81, 3.60]). In line with this, there were considerably more yes-responses in the “self” condition on the question of whether the purposes were attained (see Table 1). To explain this result, in the “self” condition participants had to rely on clues from the target’s behaviors and on their own interpersonal “theories” in order to arrive at an appraisal of success. Thus, there was more room for ego-serving tendencies, entailing greater self-attribution of success. A related hedonistic explanation is that participants presumably recalled, and/or chose to give an account of, particularly positive episodes and hence selected rather successful ones for their stories. For another explanation, note that in really successful ingratiation the receiver does not suspect ulterior motives, believing (e.g.) the compliment at face value, which means that he or she does not recognize the other’s behavior as an ingratiation attempt. Hence, such an episode is less likely to figure in the recipient’s memory when asked to recall an ingratiation experience.
Concluding discussion
Our study is one of the few that included the perspective of the sender (cf. Gordon, 1996). This was a worthwhile expansion as it yielded two novel findings: Female ingratiators considered their ingratiation attempts as more successful; and ingratiation attempts were judged as more successful by senders than by receivers.
Turning to the receiver perspective (“other” condition), we found that compliments and positive self-presentation were reported as more successful when deemed honest. This is not a surprising finding but to our knowledge it has not been reported heretofore. An ingratiation attempt was reported as more successful by the receiver when she/he saw a nonmanipulative motive (“Just being nice etc.”) than when she/he saw a manipulative one (attraction-seeking) behind it. And we found indications of lower success ratings if the ingratiation attempt came from a dependent person than from one in the superior position. Both findings had been reported before but not with our kind of method involving real-life settings.
Our method involves recollected episodes being written down. Instructions contained no restrictions whatever. This means that a great variety of settings, participants, and behaviors make up the reference materials. This fact may explain why not more, or stronger, differences were found. Indeed, the great “variance” in settings makes our results appear rather “strong.”
This is a nonexperimental study and causality could run in both directions of two variables. Thus, a high honestness rating could be caused by (instead of being a cause of) a high success rating. And an attributed ulterior motive could be caused by (instead of being a cause of) a low success rating. Such possibilities cannot be entirely discarded. They are virtually excluded in the use of the factor “dependency status” since this is, more than the foregoing ones, a “pre-given” feature characterizing the structure of the dyadic relationship. The causal direction is clear in the case of the two unexpected findings, involving the sex of participants and the sender-receiver perspective.
Could some of our results be due to the preponderance of women (about 80%) in our sample? A hypothesis could be that just-being-nice (the nonmanipulative purpose) is a more potent motivator for women, affording success more readily (since the purpose lies in the behavior itself). However, there is no significant indication of this in our data. In any case, the numerical predominance of females in our study should be kept in mind for future research, where the inclusion of same-sex and mixed-sex dyads seems especially desirable.
Would our results, with German college students, hold up with Americans? Consider the fact that participants remembered an interpersonal episode under the heading of “Einschmeicheln.” The American “ingratiation” seem to be less part of everyday language and hence could be unfamiliar to some people, whose stories might therefore not fit the definition of ingratiation. Thus, the data base might be weaker for the kind of evidence found in our study. Further, it seems that “sich einschmeicheln” connotes more surreptitiousness than “to ingratiate oneself.” According to The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1966: “Ingratiate: to establish (oneself) in the favor or good graces of others;” according to Webster’s New World Dictionary of American English, 1988: “Ingratiate:… to bring (oneself) into another’s favor or good graces by conscious effort.”
As regards the higher success ratings by female ingratiators, we submit that this would hold up also for American college students as we think that our socialization/role-related interpretation applies there, too. Concerning the generalizability of our results to non-Western cultures and ethnicities—with their great variability in sex-related socialization and sex roles—a prediction of the same sex difference would certainly have to depend on the particular culture or ethnicity under study. The latter also holds for our other factors, though to a lesser extent, as they seem to involve rather universal psychological processes with the possible exception of cultural norms governing veracity, genuineness, and modesty.
Returning to our special method, it would seem worthwhile to conduct a world-wide socio-linguistic study of the (nonacademic) existence and definitions of “ingratiation.” And, of course, we believe that the whole process of ingratiation deserves systematic cross-cultural research.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The assistance of Milena Babinsky, Mara Böhl, Christa Holzhausen, Karsten Keller, Christina Kessel, and Nicoline Simons is gratefully acknowledged.