This means that they see me valuing their role when things go well, and when things go badly, they see the problem as an external thing that we must tackle together, so there isn’t a problem of blameshifting or embarrassment, but we can immediately focus on getting things done.

Ei-Nyung: Great points that it works better in the second person case as well. Your last comment reminds me of Carol Dweck’s research, which says that it’s important to praise the actions of children not their attributes – “You worked so hard on that puzzle” instead of “You are so smart”. Interesting to think about that in a social situation as well.

The main point that goes really well with what you are saying is that people respond better when they are treated as an individual, a unique snowflake, to be prosaic. Not only does it, as in your example, create connections when you personalize a third party that you are speaking about with a second party, you create a better connection when you personalize your comments to the second party. To illustrate this, here are two examples of compliments in some situation where a guy may be hitting on a girl (I use this example since you are a hetero male ):

Situation 1:
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Guy sees pretty red-headed girl, and he thinks her hair is really pretty. Guy makes conversation. Guy gets up enough courage to say, “I really think girls with red hair are so pretty.” Guy intended to give a compliment and to make the girl feel good, but tried to keep it less personal to mitigate risk.

The probably unintended consequence is that either she doesn’t feel complimented at all because it was so impersonal or in fact feels creepily targetted because of her hair, and makes her feel the complete opposite of special — she is made to feel that the guy didn’t find HER attractive, but the guy would have made the same moves on any girl with red-hair. That “compliment”, when deconstructed, only says something about him, and nothing special about her. He has only outted himself as a fetishist.

Situation 2:
———
Same situation, but he says, instead, “You have really nice hair.” This could go badly, since she may not be open to Guy’s advances, but let’s assume Guy was going to give a compliment based on her hair either way. If she was receptive, this then is a compliment about HER, and not some statement about Guy. This is a much better compliment.

Going further re: compliments, it’s always best to personlize compliments to active things. For instance, it’s better to say, “I like the way you did your hair,” than “I like your hair,” or “You are always so good at putting together a good story,” rather than, “You have had some funny things happen to you.”

Another supporting case is the way that propagandists work hard to dehumanize the enemy during times of way–anything from the “Two Minute Hate” of 1984, to references to the ‘Huns’ in World War I, or ‘Japs’ in World War II, to many aspects of military basic training.

Anyway…. although I agree with your thesis, I’m wondering if most of the reason why that couple made it out of the plane quickly was that the flight attendants were able to issue concrete directions in this case (“rows one through thirteen”)–while the typical case (“some passengers have connections”) is just useless handwaving. It’s a bit like what they teach you in CPR classes–you don’t yell, “Somebody call an ambulance!”, you look at a specific person, and tell him or her to call an ambulance, and what specifics to relay to 911.