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I disagree. Bragging is often easy to detect from tone, context, and wording. When you respond in a very enthusiastic way to a brag, it reinforces that behavior, and is exactly the response bragging is meant to evoke (well, that or jealousy since those who brag are often still geared to view jealousy as something desirable to evoke in others). In addition, often a brag is *not* a portion of someone's life. Or at least, when it has root in reality, it is often is inflated, edited, or altered to appear more favorable. For instance, there is a huge difference between a friend telling another friend, "hey, guess what?! I won the competition" (which is probably something they are genuinely excited about and that happiness should be shared), and that same person telling a group of people, "I just won the competition. I am the top of the top 1 percent of people in the nation. I won 500 dollars, and now people are just begging me to apply to their colleges".
I didn't say you had to enthuse all over them. Simply smiling and saying a genuine "that's nice" and moving on to whatever else the conversation could be guided to will serve to both be kind and still change the focus to something that is more interesting to all. FOr example "That's nice, it sure will help a lot with costs; have you started working on your applications yet? I have and it's really hard to decide whether I want to major in archeology or in business--they both really appeal to me. What majors are y'all considering?" (direted to the whole table so that everyone gets a chance to provide conversation)
