The compliment you didn’t give

It happens all the time. The person on the other end of a call asks a genuinely good question. Someone explains something clearly. A stranger practising English has clearly worked hard at it. You notice, you think "that was good", and you say nothing. It would be a bit odd, you tell yourself. They might not care. It might come out wrong.

Psychologists have now put that hesitation to the test, and the results are remarkably consistent: the person who stays quiet is usually wrong about how the compliment would have landed.

What happens when you actually say it

In a 2021 paper, the psychologists Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns asked people to approach a stranger and pay them a simple compliment. Before doing it, the complimenters predicted how the other person would feel. Afterwards, the recipients reported how they actually felt. The givers consistently underestimated how good the compliment made people feel, and overestimated how bothered or uncomfortable they would be.

The same year, Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley published a series of experiments with the blunt title "Insufficiently complimentary?". Again, people underestimated how positive recipients would feel and overestimated how awkward the moment would be. And crucially, those wrong expectations predicted behaviour: the more awkward people expected a compliment to be, the less likely they were to give one.

The same mistake, with thank-you notes

An earlier study by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, published in 2018, looked at gratitude. Participants wrote a short letter thanking someone who had mattered to them, then predicted how the recipient would react. Recipients turned out to be more surprised and more pleased than the writers expected, and far less awkward. Writing the letters took most people only a few minutes.

The thing that stops us is not the other person. It is our forecast of them.

Why our forecast is so far off

One explanation that comes up in this research is a difference in focus. When we are about to compliment or thank someone, we worry about competence: will I word this well, will it sound strange, will I trip over it? The person receiving it pays much less attention to the wording. What they register is warmth: someone noticed, and bothered to say so.

That asymmetry makes the moment look riskier from the inside than it is from the outside. You are grading your own delivery; they are simply receiving something kind.

How to give a good one

1. Be specific. "That is a really good question" beats "you are nice". Specific praise shows you were actually listening.
2. Point at a choice, not a feature. An idea, an effort, a joke, the way someone handled a hard topic. With people you have just met, especially online, leave looks out of it.
3. Mean it. The research is about honest compliments. Flattery used to get something is a different thing, and people tend to sense it.
4. Say it once and move on. No speech needed. A sentence, then back to the conversation.
5. Do not wait for the perfect moment. The perfect moment is usually right after you noticed.

On a call with a stranger this is easier than it sounds. You will probably never speak again, which removes most of the stakes, and a kind sentence is often the thing people remember about a conversation long after the topic has gone.

Somebody did something well near you today. What would it cost to tell them?

Sources: Boothby, E. J. & Bohns, V. K. (2021), "Why a simple act of kindness is not as simple as it seems: Underestimating the positive impact of our compliments on others", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin; Zhao, X. & Epley, N. (2021), "Insufficiently complimentary?: Underestimating the positive impact of compliments creates a barrier to expressing them", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Kumar, A. & Epley, N. (2018), "Undervaluing gratitude: Expressers misunderstand the consequences of showing appreciation", Psychological Science.