“Don’t Bother Your Pretty Little Head”

We examined whether appearance compliments, despite their flattery, undermine cognitive performance. In Study 1, women participants ( N = 88 Israeli university students) who wrote about past situations in which they had received appearance compliments (but not competence-related compliments) showed worse math performance than women in a control/no compliment condition—especially if they scored high on trait self-objectification (TSO). In Study...