When we give genuine compliments, do we underestimate the happiness and overestimate the awkwardness they bring?

Details

The research combined surveys with nine experiments to investigate why people hold back from giving genuine compliments. In the surveys, people reported giving fewer compliments than they thought they should or wanted to give. In experiments comparing expectations with reactions, participants wrote genuine compliments and predicted how happy and awkward recipients would feel. Givers consistently underestimated recipients’ positive feelings and overestimated their awkwardness.

The experiments suggest that this gap partly reflects how givers think their compliments will come across: they underestimated how well expressed recipients would find them and, to a lesser extent, how warm they would seem. Expectations about recipients’ reactions also helped explain interest in giving compliments. In a separate experiment, directing people to focus on the warmth their compliments conveyed increased their interest in giving them; this result concerns interest, not necessarily more compliments actually being given.

The central finding is about genuine compliments in the studied settings, not a guarantee that every compliment will be welcome. The abstract gives no sample sizes, effect sizes or cultural and relationship details, so it cannot establish how large the gap is or whether it holds specifically between strangers. The authors’ suggestion that people similarly underestimate the benefits of other kind actions is a broader hypothesis, not an established result of these compliment experiments.