LY #130 When is a Compliment "Real"?

From Emergency Compliment site

Got this as part of an email from a student who has been doing well in my Visual Rhetoric class: "Also, I wanted to let you know that I really really enjoyed your class. I loved everything you taught us and really felt like I understood the topics and concepts. It made me rethink my career path, actually. I am extremely grateful that I took this course, thank you for offering it."

This compliment felt good to get for a variety of reasons having to do with both the sender/encoder  and the receiver/decoder of the compliment.  Well, honestly, all the reasons have to do with the receiver/decoder, myself, because I take power difference and sender motivation into account when I receive a compliment.  If I don't actually quiz the person giving a compliment (which I don't) I need to run through my own list of possible purposes.

1. Compliments are given to create identification with an authority figure in order to receive something from that authority figure.  This is called "Flattery."  When flattery is the intention, one cannot believe the content of a compliment because a flatterer will say something positive to a person in authority whether or not it is based on fact or not.  Of this motivation the bard has warned us often, most cynically in Timon of Athens: 
   O, that men's ears should be
   To counsel deaf, but not to flattery!                                                   
2.  Compliments are given because they are a shared communal practice and thus an expected performance.  Such compliments may be based in fact or not, depending on the situation and the self-concept of the person giving the compliment.  If a person thinks of him or herself as "honest," then they will be motivated to give an compliment based in fact.  If people don't mind being dishonest then they will bend the truth in order to keep the peace.
3. Compliments are given out of a desire to "make" another person feel good.  Such compliments may be based in fact or not.  They may arise from the following aspects in a sender's psyche.  a)  The sender may have a desire to have all people in the vincinity feeling good about themselves because that's the way the sender can feel comfortable in the world.  b)  The sender perceives the receiver as "broken" and needs to fix the break.  c) The sender seeks attention and gets a neurotransmitter "ping" when the complimented person smiles.
4. While the sender may have many unexplored psychic reasons for giving a compliment, the sender perceives that compliment as arising out of an honest and direct response to an experience of the receiver's performance or appearance.

 For a more scientific view of compliments, the reader might want to review such work as Ming Chung-yu's "Sociolinguistic competence in the complimenting act of native Chinese and American English speakers: a mirror of cultural values," in Language and Speech (March, 2005) in which she offers a great literature review and finds the following:  

"It is argued that the main function of compliments is to establish solidarity between speaker and addressee . . .In other words, compliments can be considered social lubricants that serve to "create or maintain rapport." Compliments may also be employed to serve other functions . . . A commonly seen phenomenon in human interaction, for instance, is that people frequently offer praise to reinforce or encourage the desired behavior in specific situations, such as teaching and learning. Another possible function compliments may serve is to strengthen or replace other speech acts like apologizing, greeting, reprimanding, or thanking, or to soften acts such as criticism, or even to serve as acts like sarcasm or a conversation opener . . . " 

The Journal of Politeness Research also offers a variety of articles on compliments.

No matter my perception of the motivation for a compliment, I always say, "Thank-you."  BUT, how much of the compliment I "take in" as having anything to do with me, personally, depends, as I said above, on my perception of the sender's motivation.

When it comes to compliments from students my perception is colored by the student's grade status and his or her previous displayed honesty.  I will tend to accept a compliment as "genuine" and a believable response to the sender's experience of me or my behavior if

• the student  has been receiving As and I have received no compliments from that student previously. (So I assume that there is no motivation for higher grades and also that the compliment is not just a habituated practice)
• the student has problems with controlling utterances in the classroom:  has a tendency to "blurt."  (So I assume that the compliment arises from an ungoverned honest response to experience.)

The reasons I felt good about the compliment above are

• The student has been doing good work in the class
• My previous behaviors could have been interpreted as being hard on the student by requesting she send me a scan of a hospital receipt when she claimed an emergency visit.
• My own discomfort with how the class has gone.  I've been presenting the class by the seat of my pants and would do it completely differently if I were ever to teach it again.  I have been highly critical of my own performance.  Thus, to be honest, as a receiver/encoder I am motivated by a hunger to hear that the class wasn't as incoherent as I thought it was.

Now I want to finish up my discussion of compliments by talking about two other situations of their occurrence.  I do not mention here the motivations of the "decoder."

 When a comes to compliments from institutional workers with less status than I have, I accept the compliment if

• both of us know I have no power to influence assessment decisions made about that person
• I have never heard that person offer a spurious compliment to another co-worker who they have previously or afterwords trashed

When it comes to compliments from institutional workers with more status than myself, I accept the compliment if

• it isn't followed by a request to do more work.