>>> Watch the video by clicking here.
Imagine this situation:
You get up in the morning. You take a shower.
If you're a man, you shave. If you're a woman, maybe you put on your makeup.
You spend all morning making your hair look good, dressing up, and spending a lot of time in front of the mirror putting yourself together so you look great.
You go out into the world, you get to the office and someone says to you, "Hey, you look great today. What a great outfit. You're looking great."
And what do you say? You say, "Oh no, no, no. This thing? No, no, I don't look so good at all. I just threw all this together."
So why do we do that? Why do we have such a hard time accepting compliments?
I'm going to talk to you about how to accept the compliment graciously.
I'm also going to talk about why it's so hard to accept the compliment and why we're so tempted to actually refuse compliments and deny them and deflect them.
Accepting a Compliment – Two Competing Pressures
On the surface, our response to compliments seems really puzzling because people are saying something nice to us. Why don't we just accept it? Why don't we just say thank you?
I think the most gracious way to respond to a compliment is simply by saying, "Thank you," or, "That's very kind of you to say," something like that. That's the most gracious way to accept the compliment. Why is it so hard for us to do that?
We can imagine that when people say mean things about us, when people criticize us, that would be really difficult. Responding to criticism is really hard and we can understand why it's really hard. It's directly face threatening. Our identity is at stake and people are being mean to us. That's hard. But why when people are being kind to us, saying nice things about us, why do we have such difficulty then? That's what this post is about.
We may find the answer to this in the work of a communication scholar at the University of Albany named Anita Pomerantz. Years ago, she wrote a paper about compliment responses, which I'm basing this post on. Anita Pomerantz says that when we respond to a compliment, we're stuck because there are two competing goals that we're faced with. They are contradictory goals.
On the one hand, compliments are a kind of offer that demands the sort of structurally and ordinarily demands an agreement. So when people make us offers or invitations, there's social pressure on us to agree. That's the one goal – agree with the compliment as a kind of offer.
But then there's a contradictory and competing goal, which is to not engage in self-praise or be immodest or conceited or arrogant. So these two things run directly into each other.
On the one hand, there's a structural preference for agreement. There is social pressure to agree to an offer like a compliment. And then there's this other social pressure not to engage in self praise. So what are we going to do?
This is what makes responding to compliments so hard. We want to agree and we want to avoid self-praise. We don't know how to do both at the same time.
As a result, we get all these unusual forms of responses to compliments. I'm going to list the typical responses to compliments Pomerantz lists in her article.
Typical Compliment Responses
Other than the “Thank you very much,” which I think is the most gracious way of responding to a compliment, we get these unusual responses as people try to respond to the two simultaneous pressures that compliments put us under.
1. Downgrade the Praise
One of the first ways that people choose to respond to compliments and to these two competing pressures is to do what Pomerantz calls a praise downgrade. Somebody praises us for something, and then we repeat the praise but in a more modest way.
This is a way of accepting the compliment but showing people that we don't want to engage in too much self-praise. So we downgrade the thing that people are complimenting us about.
Here are some examples.
Person 1: "I've been offered a full scholarship at Berkeley and UCLA."
Person 2: "That's fantastic."
Person 1: "Oh, isn't that good?"
This person downgrades the praise from “That’s fantastic” to “isn't that good”. This shows modesty and a reluctance to engage in self-praise.
Person 1: "Oh, it was just beautiful."
Person 2: "Well, thank you. I thought it was quite nice."
This person receives the compliment and says, "Well, thank you." So they actually accept the compliment. "I thought it was quite nice." But we go from beautiful to quite nice. This is a praise downgrade, and it shows that we're accepting the compliment, but we are also dramatizing that we're unwilling to engage in too much self-praise by downgrading the compliment to a lesser form of compliment.
2. Disagree With the Compliment
Another common way of responding to this double bind pressure that compliments put us in is simply to disagree. Even though there's structural preference for agreement to offers like compliments, sometimes the norm against self-praise is so strong that we just won't agree with a compliment.
Let’s look at to see examples of this.
Person 1: "Gee, Hon, you look nice in that dress."
Person 2: "Do you really think so? It's just a rag my sister gave me."
I think this is one of the most common ways that we respond to compliments about the way we look is again to disagree and to denigrate the thing that's been praised. And this is a way of sort of showing our humility.
Person 1: "You did a great job cleaning up the house."
Person 2: "Well, I guess you haven't seen the kids room."
Someone wants to compliment us for cleaning up the house. And then we disagree and say, "Well, we really didn't do a very good job at all. You didn't see this other room that I didn't clean." These are disagreements and you see these all the time. If you've ever wondered why we are doing this, it's because we feel the pressure not to engage in self-praise or conceit or arrogance.
3. Change the Compliment’s Reference
Yet another strategy we use to avoid engaging in self-praise is to change the reference of the compliment to something other than ourselves. Someone compliments us and then we shift the focus to something other than us. This is again a way of dramatizing our modesty and our reluctance to engage in self-praise. Let's have a look at it.
Person 1: "You're a good rower, honey."
Person 2: "Well, these are very easy to row, very light."
They shift the reference from themselves as a good rower to the fact that it's really about the boat, not about the rower. This is shifting the references as a way of dramatizing our modesty and our reluctance to engage in self-praise.
Person 1: "That's beautiful."
Person 2: "Isn't that nice?"
Person 1: "Yeah, it really is."
Person 2: "It wove itself once it was set up."
This is a way of shifting the reference from ourselves to other things to dramatize our modesty.
4. Return the Compliment
One final way that we respond to compliments is it's another way of shifting the reference is we just return the compliment. Someone compliments us, and rather than accepting the compliment or disagreeing, we simply return the compliment in kind. Let’s show a couple of examples of this.
Person 1: "You sound real nice."
Person 2: "Yeah, you sound real good too."
There's a simple return of the compliment.
Person 1: "You're looking good."
Person 2: "Great. So are you."
These are just returns of compliments. They're ways of shifting the reference from self to something other than self. They dramatize modesty. They allow us to obey this social constraint against self praise and they solve that problem for us.
Summary
Those are some examples of why compliments are so difficult to respond to.
They put us in a jam between being forced to agree with someone who makes us a generous offer, like a compliment, and being forced not to engage in self-praise.
We're put in a double bind, hence the awkwardness many of us feel when we're trying to respond to a compliment.
Each of these gives you some options if you struggle on how to respond to a compliment. You can shift the reference. You can engage in this downgrade of the praise when someone says something that is totally wonderful. You say, "Oh, it's very nice." Or you can return the compliment. Those are three basic strategies, or you can disagree.
I think from the point of view of being gracious, the best way to accept the compliment is simply to say, "Thank you." I sometimes will say something like, "Thank you. It's very kind of you to say so."
This is a slight shifting of the reference back to the other person as well. I guess it is returning the compliment in another way. But that tends to be the pattern that I try to use when someone compliments me.
I'll say, "Thank you very much," and this allows me to accept that and also increase my confidence. Then I say something like, "Very kind of you to say so," which shifts the reference back a little bit.