Flattery*

Imitation, The Greatest Form of Flattery?

The Negative Effects of Praise and Flattery

An experiment examines the claims that players are (1) susceptible to flattery and praise from a video game, (2) that the effects are similar to flattery and praise from humans and (3) that flattery and praise can impair a player's performance. In two playsessions participants (N = 42) were asked to play a casual video game. Half of the participants were only exposed to the original game sounds...

Observing Flattery: A Social Comparison Perspective

This research investigates how observers react when they see someone else being given a compliment that is flattering but that appears sincere. Prior work suggests that to the extent the compliment is perceived to be genuine, observers will not judge the source negatively. Merging insights from social comparison research and dual attitudes theory, this article presents a novel conceptualization...

Flattery and Persuasion: A Dual Attitudes Perspective

EXTENDED ABSTRACT Several studies have shown that the target of flattery evaluates the flatterer positively, because people have a basic desire to believe good things about themselves (e.g., Vonk 2002). Recent research, however, suggests a caveat. Namely, when people are aware of an ulterior motive (e.g., the consumer who suspects that a salesperson is offering a compliment just to close the sa...

Self-serving interpretations of flattery: why ingratiation works.

Persons who are flattered are more likely to assign credibility to and like the flatterer than observers, presumably because they are motivated by vanity. In existing studies, however, the difference between targets and observers has been confounded with other variables. The present experiments demonstrate that the target-observer difference in judgments of an ingratiator is not affected by the...