Gender stereotypes and communication styles: a case study of compliments on Facebook in Jordan

Abstract This paper examines the influence of gender stereotypes on communication styles, specifically investigating how the gender of Jordanians may affect their selection of compliments on Facebook. The analysis is based on a corpus of 200 compliments and 200 compliment responses collected from the platform. The researchers utilized the model developed by Eslami et al. (2019. Online compliments of Iranian Facebook users. In From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: Multilingual and multicultural perspectives, 68–92) for data analysis. A mixed-method approach was employed to analyze the data both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results revealed that mixed compliments, which combine verbal and non-verbal elements, were the most frequently used (66 %), followed by verbal compliments (30 %) and non-verbal compliments (4 %). Among both verbal and mixed compliments, explicit compliments emerged as the most prevalent type (73 %). Gender differences were observed in lexical choices and the use of modifiers. Males tended to favor expressions associated with masculinity and social authority, while females used more emotionally driven and aesthetically focused language. These findings suggest that online platforms, such as Facebook, both reflect and reinforce traditional gender roles within the Jordanian society. This analysis could lead to a better understanding of how gender and different cultural backgrounds shape communication styles on social media platforms.