You're looking great today!

You are looking great today!

Something that has always I have personally always noticed when people have said something nice to me was how they always smile after I say thank you, you can never actually tell who feels better me or them. So this inquiry project has allowed me to dive deeper into the everyday world around me with something as simple as compliments.

Something that I wanted to explore more about how the whole idea of complementing was not how it made the other person feel; but how I felt after it. A big question that was in my head the entire time was how come people do compliment strangers? Because they wanted something out of it? Or to simply just make somebody's day that much better? Something that I found really helpful to begin my experiment was a study done at Concordia University, which was titled “Giving and Receiving compliments- What are your intentions” (http://comjournal.csp.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/08/GivingandReceivingCompliments-Whatareyourintentions-1.pdf) in which they were studying to gain insight at the relationship between peoples intentions and the types of compliments they were giving, I feel like this supports my personal inquiry beacuse it directly relates to one of main questions about how does it make them feel.

To being my personal inquiry experiment I wanted to really sit down think about what questions I wanted to be acting on for my week of studying some of the things I intended to look at were, what are the different types of compliments?, what type do people like the best?, does age play a role?, how do they feel? How do I feel?. My plan of action was to complement one stranger at various times of the day with various differences in age and education levels, along with complimenting both male and females. Something that I was hesitant about was complimenting men because I did not want it to seem like I was hitting on them, when in reality I just wanted to come off nice along with complimenting somebody at 7:30AM because it would be breaking a social norm which is outlined by   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238428/Nearly-half-adults-avoid-talking-hour-wake-up.htm. Something else that I wanted to focus on was how I was affected personally by complimenting strangers, if it made me feel uncomfortable or if I actually felt like I was making a difference. I was worried about going so far out of my comfort zone because I typically do not reach out to strangers especially to strangers of the other sex and people older than me.

On the first day of my experiment I went out and complimented a girl wearing a Kappa Kappa Gamma sweatshirt similar to this one pictured, since girls complimenting other girls clothing is something really common for girls to like.  Because she took my compliment so well it really was something that boosted my confidence about talking to strangers. When complimenting the male student my own age was probably the one thing I was more hesitant about due to the fact that I didn’t really know what to say about his appearance because I did not want to come off creepy along with the fact that it was so early in the morning so it was already sort of awkward to begin with. Since it was was so early I figured something about that we both had in common would be best, I choose to say something about his birkenstock sandals since we were both wearing them, I did not get the same reaction similar to the other compliment I gave to the girl regarding her sweatshirt but I believe this might have been due to the early morning time. Something I did notice as a result of experiment was the people seemed to be happier about the compliments regarding their physical appearance, which was something I was really surprised about because right now there is a big push towards complementing things other than physical appearance.

Something I really took away from this experiment was that people really did seem to appreciate what I was telling them even if it was at 8 in the morning and all I got was mumbled thank you. I saw a very interesting parallel between the idea of physical compliments and compliments regarding people's personality traits like the one that I gave to my teacher for being so patient with my homework. In the media you see large pushes towards things mattering on inside more but lately there also has been pushes in the media for looking good constantly. In conclusion I feel like compliments really can improve the world we live in with just a little niceness surrounding each and every one of us.