Effects of gender and generation on Chinese self-praise on social media

Abstract Self-praise is an often-examined topic in pragmatics studies, but it has rarely been investigated from the point of view of variational pragmatics. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of gender and generation on Chinese self-praise on social media. A total of 400 self-praise posts were collected from Weibo, the Chinese version of X (formerly Twitter), from eighty participants (forty females and forty males). The analysis found that females praised their own appearance and possessions significantly more frequently than males, while males paid much more attention to competence than females. There were significant differences between the older and younger groups in terms of their use of the modified explicit self-praise strategy and the implicit self-praise strategy. In addition, there were significant differences between the two groups in relation to the topics of appearance, possessions, competence and virtue. The underlying social factors behind these similarities and differences are discussed.