Amour-propre: self-love disguised as virtue (La Rochefoucauld)
Self-love that hides inside apparent virtue. La Rochefoucauld's line: 'Our virtues are most often only vices in disguise.' Generosity, modesty, sincerity and even humility can be ways of securing regard.
What drives it
It keeps self-regard intact while looking selfless, and lets the person collect esteem for qualities whose real payoff is the esteem. It tells you to look at a virtue's payoff, not its form.
How it shows
Work
Performed humility ('I'm just the guy who gets out of the way') from a leader who notes who noticed; the donor who needs the plaque; the 'brutally honest' colleague whose honesty lands mostly on rivals; modest deflection of praise that invites more of it. La Rochefoucauld: 'The refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.'
Relationships
Gifts with a ledger. Forgiveness that keeps the moral high ground. Listening that is waiting for its turn.
Self
Would you do the good thing if nobody, including you, could ever know you'd done it? Notice what you feel when it goes unacknowledged.
What tells it apart
Self-enhancement: Self-enhancement inflates one's traits openly; amour-propre works through apparent self-effacement. The tell is self-deprecation placed where it will be contradicted.
Impression management: Impression management is often conscious and tactical; amour-propre is believed by the person, who thinks they are simply modest or kind.
Communal narcissism: Communal narcissists openly claim to be exceptionally helpful; amour-propre's claims are quiet and arrive through others' praise.
A test
Withhold the acknowledgement the virtue seems to invite and watch for sulking, a retelling of the story, or a second attempt to fish for it.
Questions to carry
- When the expected thanks for a kind act didn't come, what followed: sulking, a retelling, or another try?
- Which of my good qualities do I most want noticed, and what happens in me when nobody does?
How strong the research is
weak. An aphorist's observation, overstated as a universal law; its core is well supported by research on self-enhancement, self-serving bias and moral hypocrisy, which finds people often want to appear moral more than to be moral (Batson and colleagues, from 1997).
Where it comes from
François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665; later distinguished from healthy self-love (amour de soi) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1755
On the family tree: François de La Rochefoucauld
Sources
- François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales) (1665)