“As Bucior’s account demonstrates, more often than not, the simple compliment is much more than an observation of a cute jacket or a new hairdo. It’s an opening rhetorical salvo: “In the United States, the compliment is a coded invitation to chitchat, and simply saying, ‘Thank you’ linguistically slams the door in the complimenter’s face.””
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/why-taking-a-compliment-is-so-hard.html