So you’re essentially using politeness signals as a way of dodging fundamental attribution error. This seems to be a pretty useful guideline for situations in which conspicuous politeness-signaling could be expected to be productive: more intimacy means better motivational models and thus less expectation of politeness, while more stressful situations or greater cultural or situational distance between actors means their model of you is on average less reliable and increases politeness’s relative importance. I can’t think of any situations offhand where these predictions would fail.
It ignores the status and situational formality dimensions, though. I’ve had friends working in retail tell me that they feel awkward when a customer thanks them for an ordinary transaction, which probably comes out of a violation of status expectations—of course, I thank clerks anyway.
Oh, interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before but it does immediately make sense.
It’s true about status, though. It works out okay in my current time and place, where I very rarely encounter people whose status is so drastically and publicly different from mine that it would call for significantly different behavior. Or at least, that’s my perception; if I encountered one of your friends on the other side of a cash register, we’d apparently have different ideas about what our relative status was and what level of courtesy was called for. I wonder what leads to that difference.
So you’re essentially using politeness signals as a way of dodging fundamental attribution error. This seems to be a pretty useful guideline for situations in which conspicuous politeness-signaling could be expected to be productive: more intimacy means better motivational models and thus less expectation of politeness, while more stressful situations or greater cultural or situational distance between actors means their model of you is on average less reliable and increases politeness’s relative importance. I can’t think of any situations offhand where these predictions would fail.
It ignores the status and situational formality dimensions, though. I’ve had friends working in retail tell me that they feel awkward when a customer thanks them for an ordinary transaction, which probably comes out of a violation of status expectations—of course, I thank clerks anyway.
Oh, interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before but it does immediately make sense.
It’s true about status, though. It works out okay in my current time and place, where I very rarely encounter people whose status is so drastically and publicly different from mine that it would call for significantly different behavior. Or at least, that’s my perception; if I encountered one of your friends on the other side of a cash register, we’d apparently have different ideas about what our relative status was and what level of courtesy was called for. I wonder what leads to that difference.