Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective
Elaine Chan and Jaideep Sengupta use a dual attitudes perspective to study flattery by marketing agents. They show that when flattery comes with an obvious ulterior motive, and targets discount the compliments as a result, the initial favourable reaction (the implicit attitude) still sits alongside the discounted evaluation (the explicit attitude). The implicit attitude had more influential consequences than the explicit one, so flattery can have a subtle effect even when a person has consciously corrected for it. The authors also show how and why the gap between the two attitudes can be narrowed, and draw implications for research on flattery and on dual attitudes. The abstract gives no sample sizes.
Elaine Chan and Jaideep Sengupta use a dual attitudes perspective to study flattery by marketing agents. They show that when flattery comes with an obvious ulterior motive, and targets discount the compliments as a result, the initial favourable reaction (the implicit attitude) still sits alongside the discounted evaluation (the explicit attitude). The implicit attitude had more influential consequences than the explicit one, so flattery can have a subtle effect even when a person has consciously corrected for it. The authors also show how and why the gap between the two attitudes can be narrowed, and draw implications for research on flattery and on dual attitudes. The abstract gives no sample sizes.
Written from the openAlex abstract record read 2026-10-22.
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Chan, E., & Sengupta, J. (2010). Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective. Journal of Marketing Research, 47(1), 122-133. doi:10.1509/jmkr.47.1.122