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Backhanded Compliments: How Negative Comparisons Undermine Flattery
... Impression mismanagement also occurs when people strive to achieve two somewhat conflicting self-presentational goals: eliciting liking and attaining status. An example is the delivery of backhanded compliments (Sezer, Brooks, & Norton, 2016), that is, compliments that draw a comparison with a negative standard from both the flatterer's and the recipient's perspective (e.g., "You are smart for an intern"). People often give compliments to gain favorable impressions (Liden & Mitchell, 1988), as recipients view those who pay compliments in favorable light (Gordon, 1996;Jones, Stires, Shaver, & Harris, 1968). ...
... Actors deploy backhanded compliments to communicate superior status and garner liking (Sezer et al., 2016). ...
... Also, they mismanage their impression under the influence of high levels of narcissism, boomeranging into social or relational awkwardness (Sedikides et al., 2015b). These antecedents are associated, independently or jointly, with implementation of suboptimal impression management strategies, such as (a) miscalculating the negative consequences of their self-presentation tactics on the way an observer would think about himself or herself (Hoorens et al., 2012); (b) trying to combine bragging, complaining, and appearing humble (humblebragging), thus ending up with a disapproving audience (Sezer et al., 2017); (c) behaving in a hypocritical manner, thus risking that their cover is later blown (Laurent et al., 2014); and (d) delivering backhanded compliments, and consequently engendering audience disapproval (Sezer et al., 2016). ...
People routinely manage the impressions they make on others, attempting to project a favorable self-image. The bulk of the literature has portrayed people as savvy self-presenters who typically succeed at conveying a desired impression. When people fail at making a favorable impression, such as when they come across as braggers, regulatory resource depletion is to blame. Recent research, however, has identified antecedents and strategies that foster systematic impression management failures (independently of regulatory resource depletion), suggesting that self-presenters are far from savvy. In fact, they commonly mismanage their impressions without recognizing it. We review failed perspective taking and narcissism as two prominent antecedents of impression mismanagement. Further, we argue that failed perspective taking, exacerbated by narcissism, contributes to suboptimal impression management strategies, such as hubris, humblebragging, hypocrisy, and backhanded compliments. We conclude by discussing how self-presenters might overcome some of the common traps of impression mismanagement.
... A "boys will be boys" excuse can help men justify treating women poorly; This reinforces the phenomenon that men are not judged as harshly (in the public eye) for "bad behavior" while women are often vilified when they do the same things; Leaders hold women to higher standards at work (Abel, 2019) If a woman does not stay in ideal physical shape, her significant other will pay for her to have plastic surgery so she can meet his standard Tearing down female self-confidence and promoting male over-confidence (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2019; Exley & Kessler, 2019) A male praises his female partner for being "lowmaintenance", inferring that most women are highmaintenance When we praise a woman at work by calling her "wellspoken" or "professionally dressed", etc., it can actually be a back-handed compliment that exacerbates stereotypes (Sezer, Prinsloo, Brooks, & Norton, 2019) Instructing men to "act like a man" or for women to be "ladylike" ...
Purpose
The purpose of this manuscript is to explore an assignment given to students in an online gender and leadership graduate course as a tool to help them think critically about how music influences perceptions of gender roles in both society and leadership.
Design/methodology/approach
The assignment directs students to review the current Billboard “Hot 100” chart, which lists the top 100 songs in the United States each week based on sales and streams. Students are prompted to identify a song with gendered themes and discuss how the song portrays women and/or men, what gender stereotypes the song supports or refutes, and whether the messaging is positive or negative in nature. Finally, the students discuss ways that the message in the song could influence the listener’s opinion about gender stereotypes and what effect that could have on gendered leadership issues.
Findings
Students use this assignment as an opportunity to apply the course material that relates to the importance of gender representation and the influence of media on gender issues in leadership.
Originality/value
Recommendations are provided to inspire creative ideas for leadership educators who seek to prepare students to understand organizational challenges related to gender issues in leadership.
... In contrast to self-promotion, other-promotion involves broadcasting the accomplishments or abilities of others. Individuals who promote others project warmth (Chaudhry & Loewenstein, 2019;Kumar & Epley, 2018;Sezer et al., 2019;Zhao & Epley, 2021), but risk diminishing perceptions of their competence, especially if they fail to communicate important information about their own abilities or accomplishments (Ames et al., 2010;Brandt et al., 2009;Chaudhry & Loewenstein, 2019). For example, when accomplishments reflect joint work, people who engage in only otherpromotion may fail to claim credit for their own achievements. ...
To create favorable impressions and receive credit, individuals need to share information about their past accomplishments. Broadcasting one’s past accomplishments or claiming credit to demonstrate competence, however, can harm perceptions of warmth and likability. In fact, prior work has conceptualized self-promotion as a hydraulic challenge: tactics that boost perceptions along one dimension (e.g., competence) harm perceptions along other dimensions (e.g., warmth). In this work, we identify a novel approach to self-promotion: We show that by combining self-promotion with other-promotion (complimenting or giving credit to others), which we term “dual-promotion,” individuals can project both warmth and competence to make better impressions on observers than they do by only self-promoting. In seven preregistered studies, including analyses of annual reports from members of Congress and experiments using social network, workplace, and political contexts (total N = 1,448), we show that individuals who engage in dual-promotion create more favorable impressions of warmth and competence than those who only engage in self-promotion. The beneficial effects of dual-promotion are robust to both competitive and noncompetitive contexts and extend to behavioral intentions.
... Any discerning person knows that the statement was not meant to be a compliment hence the controversy that was generated at the time. In a similar manner, Sezer et al. (2018) assert that back -handed compliments are compliments that draw a comparison with a negative standard to express disdain. The expression: "Your speech was good...for a woman" implicates polite disdain for the female gender. ...
... Spooner (2020) noted that one comment frequently given to Deaf writers, is that they are told they are "good writers" with the unstated follow up "for a deaf person." Such microaggressions lead to reduced motivation and self-doubt about their writing abilities (Sezer et al., 2018). Therefore, Deaf students miss the opportunities to learn and become comfortable with academic writing, which prevents them from publishing articles. ...
... We build on work that has found that individuals often engage in ineffective impression management tactics (Steinmetz et al., 2017). These tactics include humblebragging, boastful behavior that fails to boost interpersonal impressions (Sezer, Gino, & Norton, 2017), backhanded compliments (Sezer, Brooks, & Norton, 2018), attempts to hide one's own successes (Roberts Levine, & Sezer, 2020), and overlyfriendly communication strategies in negotiation (Jeong, Minson, Yeomans, & Gino, 2019). In each of these cases, individuals mis-predict the consequences of their conversational strategies on their counterparts. ...
Within a conversation, individuals balance competing objectives, such as the motive to gather information and the motive to create a favorable impression. Across five experimental studies (N = 1427), we show that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions because they believe that asking sensitive questions will make their conversational partners uncomfortable and cause them to form negative perceptions. We introduce the Communication Motives and Expectations Model and we demonstrate that the aversion to asking sensitive questions is often misguided. Question askers systematically overestimate the impression management and interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions. In conversations with friends and with strangers and in both face-to-face and computer-mediated conversations, respondents formed similarly favorable impressions of conversational partners who asked sensitive questions (e.g., “How much is your salary?”) as they did of conversational partners who asked non-sensitive questions (e.g., “How do you get to work?”). We assert that individuals make a potentially costly mistake when they avoid asking sensitive questions, as they overestimate the interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions.
... We build on work that has found that individuals often engage in ineffective impression management tactics (Steinmetz et al., 2017). These tactics include humblebragging, boastful behavior that fails to boost interpersonal impressions (Sezer, Gino, & Norton, 2017), backhanded compliments (Sezer, Brooks, & Norton, 2018), attempts to hide one's own successes (Roberts Levine, & Sezer, 2020), and overlyfriendly communication strategies in negotiation (Jeong, Minson, Yeomans, & Gino, 2019). In each of these cases, individuals mis-predict the consequences of their conversational strategies on their counterparts. ...
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3437468
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Within a conversation, individuals balance competing concerns, such as the motive to gather information and the motives to avoid discomfort and to create a favorable impression. Across three pilot studies and four experimental studies, we demonstrate that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions, because they fear making others uncomfortable and because of impression management concerns. We demonstrate that this aversion to asking sensitive questions is both costly and misguided. Even when we incentivized participants to ask sensitive questions, participants were reluctant to do so in both face-to-face and computer-mediated chat conversations. Interestingly, rather than accurately anticipating how sensitive questions will influence impression formation, we find that question askers significantly overestimate the interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions. Across our studies, individuals formed similarly favorable impressions of partners who asked non-sensitive (e.g., “Are you a morning person?”) and sensitive (e.g., “What are your views on abortion?”) questions, despite askers’ reticence to ask sensitive questions.
Compliments increase the well-being of both expressers and recipients, yet in a series of surveys people report giving fewer compliments than they should give, or would like to give. Nine experiments suggest that a reluctance to express genuine compliments partly stems from underestimating the positive impact that compliments will have on recipients. Participants wrote genuine compliments and then predicted how happy and awkward those compliments would make recipients feel. Expressers consistently underestimated how positive recipients would feel but overestimated how awkward recipients would feel (Experiments 1-3, S4). These miscalibrated expectations are driven partly by perspective gaps in which expressers underestimate how competent-and to a lesser extent how warm-their compliments will be perceived by recipients (Experiments 1-3). Because people's interest in expressing compliments is partly driven by their expectations of the recipient's reaction, undervaluing compliments creates a barrier to expressing them (Supplemental Experiments S2, S3, S4). As a result, directing people to focus on the warmth conveyed by their compliments (Experiment 4) increased interest in expressing them. We believe these findings may reflect a more general tendency for people to underestimate the positive impact of prosocial actions on others, leading people to be less prosocial than would be optimal for both their own and others' well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Impression management is a fundamental aspect of social life. From self-promotion to feedback giving, from advice-seeking to networking, people frequently find themselves in situations where they need to make a positive impression on others. Despite the long-term benefits of making a favorable impression, impression-management attempts can backfire in unintended ways. In this article, I review recent research on self-presentation, social cognition, and communication to explain when and why people have misguided intuitions about their impressions on others, document common impression-management mistakes, and propose more effective strategies to minimize actor-target asymmetries in social interactions. This review provides a theoretical framework to understand the psychology of impression (mis)management, as well as the risks and rewards of different self-presentation strategies.
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