What compliments do women prefer from men and men prefer from women?
Would you prefer to be called handsome or sexy? Good-looking or beautiful?
Do you prefer compliments on your looks or intelligence?
In 2015, I surveyed people on what compliments they preferred from the opposite sex. The results were interesting!
The text of the original post is below:
Introduction and hypothesis:
First off, this isn’t real science. The respondents weren’t randomly selected, there’s no null hypothesis, and my training in data collection and analysis is a B in Research Methods in Psychology and a B+ in Scientific Inquiry in Political Science. I’m not a professional. That said, let’s dive right in!
In a recent discussion about compliments, I was curious about which compliments people prefer to hear and on what.
I hypothesized that women would prefer compliments on their brain more given that comments on looks are more frequent with women (no citation here) and the fact that women want to be respected for more than just their looks.
I expected cute to rank low for both sexes and people to prefer intelligent over smart.
Respondents:
Number of respondents that answered in time is a respectable 37:
21 females
16 males
Respondents sexual orientation ranges from heterosexual to pansexual in women to strictly heterosexual in men. Everyone in the survey is cisgender (I think.) I will have to do a survey in the future on homosexual, queer, and trans respondents’ compliment preferences.
The majority of respondents are under 30 with most being in their early to mid-20s.
The word list for women was “pretty, cute, sexy, beautiful, good-looking, attractive, gorgeous”. In formulating the list, I used the adjectives that came to mind most easily and put them in a random order. Gorgeous was added from a discussion with Adriana.
The word list for men was “cute, good-looking, hot, handsome, sexy, attractive”. In formulating the list, I used the adjectives that came to mind most easily and put them in a random order and added “hot” and “sexy” based on obvious perceived omissions of the words by my first two male respondents.
The respondent was to assume to have heard the compliment(s) from a member of the opposite sex.
Both sexes were asked the same questions “Do you prefer compliments on your looks or brain more? Is smart or intelligent better to hear?” or some close variant.
Before you see the results, make some predictions and see if you’re right. Which word(s) do you think women/men or both prefer?
The numbers don’t match the number of respondents because some answers were too specific or only covered some of the compliments in the list. The patterns are still the same.
Looks Compliment Results:
I took the most frequently ranked top two and bottom two to see what the most desirable and least desirable words were. The ones not shown in the charts are therefore clustered in the middle.
Women Top Two:
Wow, beautiful and gorgeous are the overwhelming winners here! Both are fairly gender specific in usage.
Men Top Two:
Men like being called handsome. Like the women’s top, it is fairly gender specific in usage.
Women Bottom Two:
There is a fair amount of dispersion. Cute ranks low like I thought it would and women do not prefer good-looking! This makes sense when I think about it as good-looking as a compliment is uncommon and not as striking sounding as the others for a woman.
Men Bottom Two:
Men’s results are very disperse for what they prefer least. Cute ranks low like I thought but results are way more spread out than I guessed.
Looks or brain results:
Women:
As I suspected, women overwhelming prefer compliments on their intelligence to their looks.
Men:
Men are way more split with an almost even distribution.
Smart or intelligent results:
Women:
Landslide! Only one woman preferred smart.
Men:
What’s this? While not as much as a landslide as with the women, an agreement between the sexes! Maybe intelligent just sounds more intelligent, haha.
Qualifiers:
About a third of subjects expressed situational qualifiers, i.e., whether it was a stranger or someone they knew and a whole other myriad of situational specificities.
Many subjects expressed the importance of genuineness in the compliment.
Two of the female respondents specifically mentioned that if they put effort into their physical appearance than they wanted to be acknowledged on it even though they both preferred compliments on their brain.
Two subjects (both female) expressed uncomfortability at compliments especially in regards to looks.
One respondent mentioned not really liking any after her top three. Two male respondents only preferred one to three of the compliments.
Many female respondents expressed trepidation on strangers complimenting them physically and the awkwardness and uncomfortability that can result.
Of course, with both sexes, circumstances seem to be much more important than the compliment used and besides the two outliers most everyone likes being complimented from someone they’re familiar with regardless of the word or on what.
My own ranking:
1. hot
2. sexy
3. attractive
4. cute
5. good-looking
6. handsome
My reasoning is that I prefer to be sexually attractive instead of just aesthetically pleasing which is why I ranked good-looking and handsome at the bottom. The times I’ve heard I was hot made me feel nicer than the times I’ve heard the rest. While sexy is number two, I think it is used much less frequently than the others so I’m not absolutely certain how I would feel hearing it from someone who wasn’t my partner. Cute may be ranked number four (maybe because of its non-masculine connotation) but it comes with the qualifier that in my experience, it’s what I hear girls use most frequently when they are attracted to and/or like a guy. Overall, I like hearing them all though!
I prefer compliments on my looks over my brain. While I typically feel good about both my looks and intelligence, I can be less sure of if I’m attractive to someone or not. I almost never have anxiety about my intelligence. The closest it can come to that is status anxiety from being around academics/the wealthy and not being in a prestigious academic path or rich. I actually think I prefer smart over intelligent. Maybe this scene has too much of a hold on me:
Thanks to all the beautiful/gorgeous/handsome and intelligent people that were kind enough to respond!