WHY DO PEOPLE FEAR COMPLIMENTS?

WHY DO PEOPLE FEAR COMPLIMENTS? George Vaillant, the head of the Harvard study, says that “people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day” Vaillant thinks that the reason is that positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. They expose us to rejection. Joshua Wolf Shenk, the author of the Atlantic article, gives the example of the Danish attitude to life which I posted on here (“the Danish are happier than people in other developed nations because they have low expectations.”) Wolf says that the usual Danish response to being asked how’s it going is: “Det kunne være værre (It could be worse).”