Act Like You’ve Been Here Before: Expressing Pride in Past Achievements Undermines Forecasts of One’s Performance Potential

People must frequently predict others’ performance potential. Displaying pride is thought to affect these forecasts positively because it signals that one is high achieving. However, six studies, involving 2,984 participants, show that expressing pride in specific past performances undermines assessments of one’s future achievements. The negative effect of displaying pride on performance potential forecasts emerged across achievement domains and under both separate and joint evaluations. It also affected who participants hired in an incentivized hiring experiment. These findings support the reasoning that expressing pride about a specific achievement signals that the performance was near one’s highest performance potential, whereas not expressing pride conveys that the performance was further from one’s performance potential. Two experiments reconcile these findings with past work on pride and status by showing that how pride expressions affect forecasts of performance potential depends on whether the specific pride-eliciting event is specified and held constant.