PhronesisCompulsive flattery is the reflexive, instrumental deployment of compliments and praise as a social currency—a mechanism for purchasing approval, deflecting rejection, and engineering safety in interpersonal space, largely independent of whether the praise in question is sincere. We formalize this pattern as a wrong attractor W within the Phronesis Issues framework, contrasted against the ground state S^0: calibrated, genuine appreciation that is given when it is earned, withheld when it is not, and received without the distorting lens of approval-hunger.
We introduce two formal constructs—the Compliment-Currency Architecture (CCA), which describes how instrumental praise circulates as an approval-management mechanism, and the Authentic-Regard Foreclosure Basin (ARFB), the attractor neighborhood in which sincere appreciation can neither be expressed freely nor received cleanly, because both sender and receiver have been conditioned by the inflationary regime.
Nine propositions characterize the wrong attractor: its root in rejection anxiety (P1), its constitutive mechanism as pre-emptive approval purchase (P2), recipient devaluation of the inflated signal (P3), flatterer credibility collapse (P4), the crowding-out of genuine appreciation (P5), the signal-discrimination problem (P6), the structure of the return path (P7), gradual recalibration dynamics (P8), and the stability of the ground state under selectivity (P9).
The paper closes with clinical and social implications and a set of open questions about institutional analogs of compulsive flattery.