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The Act Of Basking And Public Image

Decent Essays

In 1976, Robert Cialdini and his colleagues first defined the concept of “basking in reflected glory” (BIRGing), the tendency to improve one’s self- and public image by publicly announcing one’s association with another person or group (identification) who has become successful in some endeavor (achievement) even if one is in no way the cause of the other’s success or “glory”. That is, the act of basking is done through association based on the person and the successful other belonging to the same in-group, even if one does not have any personal connection or contribution to the other’s success (i.e. self-enhancement; Snibbe, Kitayama, Markus, & SuZuki, 2003).
In the original field study, Cialdini et al. (1976) observed that students (1) tended to accentuate their association with the university they attended if the football team representing the university won in its latest match, and (2) refer to the victory as, by extension, including them (e.g. “we won”). Conversely, when the team lost, students tended to distance themselves from the team and the university by not wearing apparel that associate them with the latter and referring to the team as a separate entity (e.g. “they lost”).
Moreover, in-group identification through BIRGing can be extended to national and cultural identities, with identification based on country-level or sociocultural in-groups (Galang, Quiñones, Adriano, Portillo, & Carvajal, 2015). Indeed, to study BIRGing through a cross-cultural approach, it is

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