To someone for whom it is normal to choose words carefully and connote respect, it’s obvious that this is the right way to go about things—it gets other people on your side, so you don’t have to fight as much to get what you want or convince people of something. It’s also more pleasant to be around, and is the way you wish to be treated.
To someone for whom it is normal to be as direct, clear, and efficient in language as possible, it’s obvious that this is the right way to go about things—it’s much more honest than insincere fluff and doesn’t waste everybody’s time. It’s also more pleasant to be around, and is the way you wish to be treated.
The bit I particularly have trouble remembering is that neither person would believe that if their method didn’t work for them. If you practice one of the above policies, I can reasonably assume that you get results from it which are acceptable to you. There appears to be a fairly strong division between people who have that experience with the former strategy, and those who have that experience with the latter strategy. Seeing that, I find myself wondering which of these scenarios is most accurate:
Does one strategy work better for some people, and the other work better for other people? Each is certainly easier for different people, but I’m asking about results.
Is the difference instead in the situation—so people who often find themselves in situations where one strategy is better prefer that strategy?
Are these just two different tools which are both often valuable?
Or of course, is it really just that one of these is a better strategy, and a lot of people are just so stuck to the other one that they won’t accept it?
The reason I care about which of these scenarios is most accurate is that they change what kind of conversation about them is appropriate. If different strategies work for different people, then trying to convince someone else to use yours is unproductive other-optimizing. If they apply to different situations, it might be interesting to examine the differences in experience that lead to each preference. If they’re both good tools, that suggests it could be worthwhile for each of us to work on the one we’re worse at. And, finally, if one of them is actually better, we can carry on trying to convince each other of which one that is.
My intuition is that defaulting to courtesy, if it is not uniformly the more useful strategy, is at least more useful in the vast majority of cases. However, I do not trust my intuition on this, because that is the strategy which is much easier and more enjoyable for me to use. When I try to think of real reasons to hold that belief, other than “it’s worked for me,” two come to mind: one is that the courteous strategy seems like it requires more skill/effort (even people who don’t prefer it seem to think so), and I don’t see why that would have developed if it weren’t valuable; the other is that I’ve read or heard several people (including the OP) say that they used to prefer the blunt strategy, but have learned to use and now see the value in the other one; I have never seen anyone describe the opposite experience.
If I’m wrong, I would like to be convinced that I’m wrong, and I feel strongly enough that I’m right that I don’t think I can do that on my own. Here are some ways you could convince me:
Describe a common situation where there is clearly more utility in stating x bluntly than stating x politely. Note that I don’t consider the extra few seconds to say a few more words to be significantly detrimental to utility. If you can come up with one which is common for you but not for me, this will lend weight to the second scenario; if you want to convince me that the blunt strategy is really generally better, I would want an example that’s common even when you’re not, say, working in a technical field.
Are you someone who is naturally inclined towards being more consciously respectful/courteous, but has switched to the other strategy because you found it more useful? What experiences led to this switch and what’s different now that you’ve switched?
Describe a common situation where there is clearly more utility in stating x bluntly than stating x politely.
Here is a fairly narrow one: when you are correcting someone who has made a serious error which they will immediately recognize as an error when it is pointed out to them.
An example took place earlier here on this thread. Lionhearted had just stated that he would bow out of the discussion now. Wedrifid misread what was written, seeing “I’m bowing out for now”, where lionhearted had actually written “I’m bowing out now”. Wedrifid responded intemperately, making a particularly big deal of the withdrawal “for now”, interpreting it as a kind of threat to return. (This comment has since been deleted by its author.)
I pointed out wedrifid’s error bluntly, and was even so discourteous as to tease him on his embarrassing error. I am confident that this was the right way to handle this kind of mistake. Anything softer would have been condescending.
So that is one situation where bluntness strikes me as clearly best. But I’m not sure that this situation generalizes well. If the mistake were less serious (a typo, say) then the superiority of bluntness is debatable. If the mistake were less clearcut, then it would probably be wise to include some justification of the judgment that it really is a mistake.
“You seem to have misread his comment—he said ‘bowing out now,’ not ‘for now.’”
If so, can you explain why? Whether you do or not, what significantly worse result would you expect from that response, as opposed to teasing him about it?
Whether you do or not, what significantly worse result would you expect from that response, as opposed to teasing him about it?
Perplexed visibly gained respect and rapport using his response. Yours would probably have just been given no response. This is just an instance where Perplexed is just better able to read the social landscape than you and so better able to calibrate his response toward gaining social capital. If he wasn’t familiar with the situation, less tuned in to the social dynamics, then he would have been well served by ‘playing it safe’. Presuming too much rapport would have been a risk—politeness is a better default.
Hmm—my goal is to inform the other person of the error. This does not require them to respond.
Your goal is a lot more than pointing out an error. You have social ends you wish to achieve—hence your whole participation in the thread. It is that element of communication that is not mere information that we are all discussing.
In actual practice I behave the way I described; I like to think that if this were drastically counterproductive for my goals, I would have noticed by now.
At any rate, the goal under discussion was informing the other person of the error in a way that didn’t result in defensiveness or aggression.
At any rate, the goal under discussion was informing the other person of the error in a way that didn’t result in defensiveness or aggression.
I am comfortable with the relevance of my statements to the goal under discussion as described by yourself, above. I can attest to the superiority of Perplexed’s approach to precisely said goal. When done well it will produce less defensiveness and aggression.
What you do personally in your life isn’t a subject that I have or would comment on—I speak only to the specific context here wherein Perplexed presented a near-optimal solution.
I pointed out wedrifid’s error bluntly, and was even so discourteous as to tease him on his embarrassing error. I am confident that this was the right way to handle this kind of mistake. Anything softer would have been condescending.
Absolutely! You gave no insult at all. You could have, if you wanted to play the polite courtier.
I think your points about why courtesy is better are missing a crucial point; which is that social interaction is all about standardisation.
Consider the old VHS versus Betamax problem (or Blu-ray versus HDD for the modern version): two systems that achieved more or less the same goals, each of which had certain advantages and disadvantages going for it. But inevitably one system became popular and it stopped being economical for manufacturers to keep making both players and media of the other type, because not enough people would have used it. And this is a good thing because it means manufacturers don’t have to produce media in both types, which means that the cost for the media that they do produce is slightly lower, and everyone except the die-hard users of the dead format wins.
Methods of social interaction are the same: you need both people who produce a certain kind of interaction and people who welcome those kinds of interactions. Regardless of which is better, the equilibrium point is towards one standard dominating—and the one that does dominate isn’t necessarily better, it was just the first to gain critical mass.
That said, my intuition is that politeness is better than not-politeness in most contexts because it allows more plausible deniability. And that intuition is resting on the assumption that most people are highly protective of their status and therefore avoid status hits at all costs, even if that means taking twice as long to get to the point.
Agreed about standardization; knowing what to expect is useful in communication generally. My dad (former pilot) is fond of pointing out that this is how pilots and ATC people understand each other over crackly radios. There’s only a small set of possible things they could be saying, and they know what to expect, so they only have to listen for whether the crackly voice matches what they’re expecting.
even if that means taking twice as long to get to the point
I still find the time argument odd. The difference doesn’t seem like that much to me, and the couple of seconds seem trivial weighed against the social currency you gain by taking them.
On further thought I think it’s less about the time than about the number of operations involved. For you a typical polite sentence probably looks more like [concept expressed politely], while to me it looks more like [[positive opener][compliment to audience][concept][indicator that my opinion is subjective][self-deprecation/joke]]. At least that’s my best guess as to why direct types complain endlessly about the effort and inefficiency of politeness while nice types don’t see what the fuss is about. It’s the difference between being able to speak the dialect fluently versus having to string a sentence together out of smaller components. Of course, my model of how you communicate may be completely off too :)
Hmm. I think you’re onto something, but that doesn’t quite fit for me. Off the top of my head, I think I do something more like this:
I run the words I’m considering saying through my mental simulation of the person I’m talking to—which is going to have “like me” or “like normal” as defaults where I lack details—and check for snags like “does not acknowledge hearer’s agency/competence” or “implies hearer smells bad.” If I find one, I’ll either remove/change the problematic wording or add words to counterbalance them.
Of course, as I get better at it, I also improve a lower-level filter on “things to not say at all,” like giving advice to people in any situation where I don’t actually have more knowledge or experience than they do. That’s another kettle of worms, though.
The difference between that and your model of me is that it’s also a multi-stage process; it’s just fast. It may bear noting that I find it really interesting how much small word choices affect implication and connotation, which probably helps a lot with not being frustrated by the task. It’s work, but it’s fun work—like a productive debugging session.
The difference between the above and your model of you is that rather than taking a concept and adding semantically null politeness indicators around it, I’m making small adjustments to the presentation of the concept.
We may not actually be doing or imagining such different things, but I think that difference in our perception of the task is very telling. Your second model definitely lends itself to descriptors like “fluff” and “inefficient” and “time-consuming,” whereas even in cases where it actually is noticeably time-consuming, the model I described above feels much more like an intellectual puzzle.
But then the question becomes: is it our different models of the mental process of diplomacy which causes us to have different feelings about it, or is it the other way around? The former seems like it would be easy to change in one’s own mind, if one wanted; the latter puts us back where we started.
Something else I notice on rereading my description is that my model depends on having fairly reliable simulations of listeners, and fairly robust defaults when a specific data is not available. I expect that being able to build those simulations is an improveable skill. Empathy is a good head start on it, but one can care enough to try and still not have enough practice to do it well. As for the defaults: as I mentioned, I’ll use myself when I don’t know any better, and the accuracy of doing so would logically correlate to neurotypicality and otherwise being more like more potential listeners.
Summary: More agreeable models of what diplomacy requires may lead to more agreeable feelings about it, or vice versa. Some skills which make it easier can probably be learned; being empathetic and being neurotypical probably give you a leg up. Nothing earth-shaking, but an interesting puzzle nonetheless.
First off, I’m not sure I agree with your argument that it’s easier for you to be polite because you find it to be an interesting puzzle. There are many things that I find interesting or rewarding but that I often don’t have sufficient patience to do all the time—eg. certain types of maths problems, linguistic translation puzzles (where you get a bunch of phrases and translations and need to tease apart the meanings of the words and affixes), and really challenging computer games. Politeness falls into the same category of interestingness, but because it’s usually mandatory it’s a bit like having to complete a captcha every time I open my mouth—I know why it’s there, it’s not that onerous most of the time, but all the same I would prefer not to have to do it.
Hmm, there’s a lot more rambly stuff I’ve been thinking about on the topic but I’m not sure how well it relates to our main discussion. Anyway, relevant bits: I’ve done enough reading and observed and participated in enough interactions to have a good idea of how to gauge politeness levels and how to achieve them (which is to say, I’m neurotypical and have average or above-average levels of empathy. I’m just lacking several years of socialisation experience to make it automatic). I think that most of the time I succeed in saying nice things and not saying offensive things. But it still feels like a lot of effort. I wouldn’t expect someone to go to that level of effort for me and in fact find it annoying and tedious to endure thanking-for-thanking, long buildups to requests, apologising for things which are clearly not the other persons’ fault, and other highly ‘polite’ behaviour. How much have you considered the level of politeness you prefer to receive as opposed to the potentially interesting/fun problem of working out what to transmit?
thanking-for-thanking, long buildups to requests, apologising for things which are clearly not the other persons’ fault
I find it utterly mystifying when people apologise to me for things that are not only clearly not their fault, but probably mine. I have no idea if this sort of thing is expected in polite company but people seem to do it all the same. I assume it’s probably involved with status signalling of some sort, but that doesn’t make it make sense to me.
I guess this is why I prefer to be in a culture with low levels of (expected) politeness. Politeness brings status into everything, introducing complicated rules that seem to just make it easier to cause unintentional offence.
Actually I’m reminded of the rather extreme example of the culture of elves in Eragon. Because of various factors including low fertility and their expertise in killing, they decided they couldn’t afford to have elves fighting amongst themselves. Apparently they then decided to introduce a complicated system of honorifics and greetings depending on the status levels, genders and occupations of the people involved.
Our hero perceives, of course, that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it. The existence of a right greeting for a particular situation out of 30 implies the existence of 29 wrong ones: 29 new ways to give offence.
I think I’ve broken the habit, but I used to apologize for things which were clearly the other person’s fault and as far as I can tell, my motivation was a strong feeling that an apology was supposed to happen, and if the other person didn’t supply it, I would.
This was a fairly strong and very fast reflex.
It seems plausible that it was the result of niceness training done a little too young or unthinkingly.
You make it sound like the alternative, where everyone has idiosyncratic notions of what is acceptable and unacceptable and there’s no way to generalize from one person to another, leads to less offense being taken.
I guess that would be true if everyone treated every possible utterance as inoffensive. Which, OK, if you can get a community to actually do that, great… but it’s far from easy to pull off.
Otherwise, not so much.
The point of etiquette is to avoid giving offense unintentionally.
When everyone knows the rules, we don’t think of it as following rules of etiquette, we think of it as not being a jerk.
The point is that in a culture where one is expected to greet someone by saying X if the other is male and above you in status, Y if they are female and above, Z if they’re a blacksmith… etc. it is much easier to give offence by accidentally using the wrong greeting than in one where you greet people with X regardless of the situation.
How does having simpler rules lead to “idiosyncratic notions of what is acceptable and unacceptable”? We seem to do fine without a rule on how to greet a one-legged chess player on a tuesday.
Sure, if what you mean by “a culture with low levels of (expected) politeness” is one in which there is one standard greeting, X, with which you greet people “regardless of the situation,” then you’re absolutely correct: that is not at all idiosyncratic.
I guess I misunderstood you: I thought you were proposing an approach where people just greet one another however they wish and they don’t worry about etiquette at all, rather than an approach where there is a single approved way of greeting everyone.
The former I think does lead to idiosyncratic standards; the latter I agree does not.
Sorry for the confusion and thanks for the clarification.
thanking-for-thanking, long buildups to requests, apologising for things which are clearly not the other persons’ fault
(Assuming you mean “not the apologizer’s fault” in the last one.) I don’t do these things, and I don’t think they’re necessary forms of courtesy, at least in a peer situation—customer service calls for jumping through hoops sometimes but I don’t think that’s what we’re discussing.
How much have you considered the level of politeness you prefer to receive as opposed to the potentially interesting/fun problem of working out what to transmit?
I suspect that I’m similar to most people in that I notice mostly when someone uses a politeness level which is not what I wanted. ;) I’m not sure what terms I could use to clarify what that level is, though.
Describe a common situation where there is clearly more utility in stating x bluntly than stating x politely.
I guess it would be when you don’t have enough skill to speak both politely and clearly. So your actual choice is just between “bluntly” and “inarticulately”.
The long-term solution to this situation is to develop the necessary skill. But the person may misunderstand the nature of situation; s/he may not understand the it’s the missing skill that causes this kind of dilemma.
(The costs-benefit calculation is a long-term one performed over all potential situations, not a short-term one performed over each specific situation)
I agree; this makes sense to me.
In certain cases, bluntness can be useful. However, by this I mean it can be useful if you are able to let people be blunt to you. See Crocker’s Rules and the related article on Radical Honesty.
If everyone in a certain social context operate on such a system (whether explicitly or implicitly), then there is some benefit to these people in terms of saving time and cognitive effort in the short term, and in the long term if they haven’t yet spent time on developing ‘politeness’.
No, I was saying that a good long-term solution is not helpful in a short term.
Let’s suppose that I completely agree with you that politeness is always the best solution. But to reach that level of politeness, a person starting from my position would have to visit therapy, then a social skill course, a presentation skill course, a diplomacy course, and this all would take at least two years. As a good rationalists I immediately join the therapy and book the courses. But how am I going to solve all the situations during those two years?
It does not help me to know that two years later I will have a perfect solution for a situation that is happening now. Therefore, during those two years, I may solve the situations bluntly, when I think it is better than not speaking at all.
Now that I’ve seen the issue framed in those terms, I can think of several cases where someone spent so long on niceness-padding that I got annoyed, lost interest, or interrupted to ask them to get to the point. I would like to add that the niceness/efficiency tradeoff is continuous, not discrete, bounded on the maximally-efficient end and unbounded on the maximally-nice end, and that there must be some amount of niceness-padding so excessive that will annoy even those who prefer prefer more of it in general.
Oh, yes, I’ll certainly agree with that. Even the examples in the original post were a little too fluffy for my taste, and I’m the one who’s a stickler for courtesy. There’s certainly a balance to be struck—enough, but no more—which I haven’t emphasized enough for how important it is. Thanks for the reminder.
I wonder how much striking that balance is part of the skill of being useful and courteous at the same time.
Something I have trouble remembering:
To someone for whom it is normal to choose words carefully and connote respect, it’s obvious that this is the right way to go about things—it gets other people on your side, so you don’t have to fight as much to get what you want or convince people of something. It’s also more pleasant to be around, and is the way you wish to be treated.
To someone for whom it is normal to be as direct, clear, and efficient in language as possible, it’s obvious that this is the right way to go about things—it’s much more honest than insincere fluff and doesn’t waste everybody’s time. It’s also more pleasant to be around, and is the way you wish to be treated.
The bit I particularly have trouble remembering is that neither person would believe that if their method didn’t work for them. If you practice one of the above policies, I can reasonably assume that you get results from it which are acceptable to you. There appears to be a fairly strong division between people who have that experience with the former strategy, and those who have that experience with the latter strategy. Seeing that, I find myself wondering which of these scenarios is most accurate:
Does one strategy work better for some people, and the other work better for other people? Each is certainly easier for different people, but I’m asking about results.
Is the difference instead in the situation—so people who often find themselves in situations where one strategy is better prefer that strategy?
Are these just two different tools which are both often valuable?
Or of course, is it really just that one of these is a better strategy, and a lot of people are just so stuck to the other one that they won’t accept it?
The reason I care about which of these scenarios is most accurate is that they change what kind of conversation about them is appropriate. If different strategies work for different people, then trying to convince someone else to use yours is unproductive other-optimizing. If they apply to different situations, it might be interesting to examine the differences in experience that lead to each preference. If they’re both good tools, that suggests it could be worthwhile for each of us to work on the one we’re worse at. And, finally, if one of them is actually better, we can carry on trying to convince each other of which one that is.
My intuition is that defaulting to courtesy, if it is not uniformly the more useful strategy, is at least more useful in the vast majority of cases. However, I do not trust my intuition on this, because that is the strategy which is much easier and more enjoyable for me to use. When I try to think of real reasons to hold that belief, other than “it’s worked for me,” two come to mind: one is that the courteous strategy seems like it requires more skill/effort (even people who don’t prefer it seem to think so), and I don’t see why that would have developed if it weren’t valuable; the other is that I’ve read or heard several people (including the OP) say that they used to prefer the blunt strategy, but have learned to use and now see the value in the other one; I have never seen anyone describe the opposite experience.
If I’m wrong, I would like to be convinced that I’m wrong, and I feel strongly enough that I’m right that I don’t think I can do that on my own. Here are some ways you could convince me:
Describe a common situation where there is clearly more utility in stating x bluntly than stating x politely. Note that I don’t consider the extra few seconds to say a few more words to be significantly detrimental to utility. If you can come up with one which is common for you but not for me, this will lend weight to the second scenario; if you want to convince me that the blunt strategy is really generally better, I would want an example that’s common even when you’re not, say, working in a technical field.
Are you someone who is naturally inclined towards being more consciously respectful/courteous, but has switched to the other strategy because you found it more useful? What experiences led to this switch and what’s different now that you’ve switched?
Here is a fairly narrow one: when you are correcting someone who has made a serious error which they will immediately recognize as an error when it is pointed out to them.
An example took place earlier here on this thread. Lionhearted had just stated that he would bow out of the discussion now. Wedrifid misread what was written, seeing “I’m bowing out for now”, where lionhearted had actually written “I’m bowing out now”. Wedrifid responded intemperately, making a particularly big deal of the withdrawal “for now”, interpreting it as a kind of threat to return. (This comment has since been deleted by its author.)
I pointed out wedrifid’s error bluntly, and was even so discourteous as to tease him on his embarrassing error. I am confident that this was the right way to handle this kind of mistake. Anything softer would have been condescending.
So that is one situation where bluntness strikes me as clearly best. But I’m not sure that this situation generalizes well. If the mistake were less serious (a typo, say) then the superiority of bluntness is debatable. If the mistake were less clearcut, then it would probably be wise to include some justification of the judgment that it really is a mistake.
Do you find this condescending?
“You seem to have misread his comment—he said ‘bowing out now,’ not ‘for now.’”
If so, can you explain why? Whether you do or not, what significantly worse result would you expect from that response, as opposed to teasing him about it?
No. That is fine too. The teasing was inessential.
Well, that’s as much politeness as I was talking about, so I still think it’s no worse than bluntness would have been.
Perplexed visibly gained respect and rapport using his response. Yours would probably have just been given no response. This is just an instance where Perplexed is just better able to read the social landscape than you and so better able to calibrate his response toward gaining social capital. If he wasn’t familiar with the situation, less tuned in to the social dynamics, then he would have been well served by ‘playing it safe’. Presuming too much rapport would have been a risk—politeness is a better default.
Hmm—my goal is to inform the other person of the error. This does not require them to respond.
Your goal is a lot more than pointing out an error. You have social ends you wish to achieve—hence your whole participation in the thread. It is that element of communication that is not mere information that we are all discussing.
In actual practice I behave the way I described; I like to think that if this were drastically counterproductive for my goals, I would have noticed by now.
At any rate, the goal under discussion was informing the other person of the error in a way that didn’t result in defensiveness or aggression.
I am comfortable with the relevance of my statements to the goal under discussion as described by yourself, above. I can attest to the superiority of Perplexed’s approach to precisely said goal. When done well it will produce less defensiveness and aggression.
What you do personally in your life isn’t a subject that I have or would comment on—I speak only to the specific context here wherein Perplexed presented a near-optimal solution.
Absolutely! You gave no insult at all. You could have, if you wanted to play the polite courtier.
I think your points about why courtesy is better are missing a crucial point; which is that social interaction is all about standardisation.
Consider the old VHS versus Betamax problem (or Blu-ray versus HDD for the modern version): two systems that achieved more or less the same goals, each of which had certain advantages and disadvantages going for it. But inevitably one system became popular and it stopped being economical for manufacturers to keep making both players and media of the other type, because not enough people would have used it. And this is a good thing because it means manufacturers don’t have to produce media in both types, which means that the cost for the media that they do produce is slightly lower, and everyone except the die-hard users of the dead format wins.
Methods of social interaction are the same: you need both people who produce a certain kind of interaction and people who welcome those kinds of interactions. Regardless of which is better, the equilibrium point is towards one standard dominating—and the one that does dominate isn’t necessarily better, it was just the first to gain critical mass.
That said, my intuition is that politeness is better than not-politeness in most contexts because it allows more plausible deniability. And that intuition is resting on the assumption that most people are highly protective of their status and therefore avoid status hits at all costs, even if that means taking twice as long to get to the point.
Agreed about standardization; knowing what to expect is useful in communication generally. My dad (former pilot) is fond of pointing out that this is how pilots and ATC people understand each other over crackly radios. There’s only a small set of possible things they could be saying, and they know what to expect, so they only have to listen for whether the crackly voice matches what they’re expecting.
I still find the time argument odd. The difference doesn’t seem like that much to me, and the couple of seconds seem trivial weighed against the social currency you gain by taking them.
On further thought I think it’s less about the time than about the number of operations involved. For you a typical polite sentence probably looks more like [concept expressed politely], while to me it looks more like [[positive opener][compliment to audience][concept][indicator that my opinion is subjective][self-deprecation/joke]]. At least that’s my best guess as to why direct types complain endlessly about the effort and inefficiency of politeness while nice types don’t see what the fuss is about. It’s the difference between being able to speak the dialect fluently versus having to string a sentence together out of smaller components. Of course, my model of how you communicate may be completely off too :)
Hmm. I think you’re onto something, but that doesn’t quite fit for me. Off the top of my head, I think I do something more like this:
I run the words I’m considering saying through my mental simulation of the person I’m talking to—which is going to have “like me” or “like normal” as defaults where I lack details—and check for snags like “does not acknowledge hearer’s agency/competence” or “implies hearer smells bad.” If I find one, I’ll either remove/change the problematic wording or add words to counterbalance them.
Of course, as I get better at it, I also improve a lower-level filter on “things to not say at all,” like giving advice to people in any situation where I don’t actually have more knowledge or experience than they do. That’s another kettle of worms, though.
The difference between that and your model of me is that it’s also a multi-stage process; it’s just fast. It may bear noting that I find it really interesting how much small word choices affect implication and connotation, which probably helps a lot with not being frustrated by the task. It’s work, but it’s fun work—like a productive debugging session.
The difference between the above and your model of you is that rather than taking a concept and adding semantically null politeness indicators around it, I’m making small adjustments to the presentation of the concept.
We may not actually be doing or imagining such different things, but I think that difference in our perception of the task is very telling. Your second model definitely lends itself to descriptors like “fluff” and “inefficient” and “time-consuming,” whereas even in cases where it actually is noticeably time-consuming, the model I described above feels much more like an intellectual puzzle.
But then the question becomes: is it our different models of the mental process of diplomacy which causes us to have different feelings about it, or is it the other way around? The former seems like it would be easy to change in one’s own mind, if one wanted; the latter puts us back where we started.
Something else I notice on rereading my description is that my model depends on having fairly reliable simulations of listeners, and fairly robust defaults when a specific data is not available. I expect that being able to build those simulations is an improveable skill. Empathy is a good head start on it, but one can care enough to try and still not have enough practice to do it well. As for the defaults: as I mentioned, I’ll use myself when I don’t know any better, and the accuracy of doing so would logically correlate to neurotypicality and otherwise being more like more potential listeners.
Summary: More agreeable models of what diplomacy requires may lead to more agreeable feelings about it, or vice versa. Some skills which make it easier can probably be learned; being empathetic and being neurotypical probably give you a leg up. Nothing earth-shaking, but an interesting puzzle nonetheless.
Related: Women apologise more because they have lower thresholds for what constitutes possible offense
First off, I’m not sure I agree with your argument that it’s easier for you to be polite because you find it to be an interesting puzzle. There are many things that I find interesting or rewarding but that I often don’t have sufficient patience to do all the time—eg. certain types of maths problems, linguistic translation puzzles (where you get a bunch of phrases and translations and need to tease apart the meanings of the words and affixes), and really challenging computer games. Politeness falls into the same category of interestingness, but because it’s usually mandatory it’s a bit like having to complete a captcha every time I open my mouth—I know why it’s there, it’s not that onerous most of the time, but all the same I would prefer not to have to do it.
Hmm, there’s a lot more rambly stuff I’ve been thinking about on the topic but I’m not sure how well it relates to our main discussion. Anyway, relevant bits: I’ve done enough reading and observed and participated in enough interactions to have a good idea of how to gauge politeness levels and how to achieve them (which is to say, I’m neurotypical and have average or above-average levels of empathy. I’m just lacking several years of socialisation experience to make it automatic). I think that most of the time I succeed in saying nice things and not saying offensive things. But it still feels like a lot of effort. I wouldn’t expect someone to go to that level of effort for me and in fact find it annoying and tedious to endure thanking-for-thanking, long buildups to requests, apologising for things which are clearly not the other persons’ fault, and other highly ‘polite’ behaviour. How much have you considered the level of politeness you prefer to receive as opposed to the potentially interesting/fun problem of working out what to transmit?
I find it utterly mystifying when people apologise to me for things that are not only clearly not their fault, but probably mine. I have no idea if this sort of thing is expected in polite company but people seem to do it all the same. I assume it’s probably involved with status signalling of some sort, but that doesn’t make it make sense to me.
I guess this is why I prefer to be in a culture with low levels of (expected) politeness. Politeness brings status into everything, introducing complicated rules that seem to just make it easier to cause unintentional offence.
Actually I’m reminded of the rather extreme example of the culture of elves in Eragon. Because of various factors including low fertility and their expertise in killing, they decided they couldn’t afford to have elves fighting amongst themselves. Apparently they then decided to introduce a complicated system of honorifics and greetings depending on the status levels, genders and occupations of the people involved.
Our hero perceives, of course, that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it. The existence of a right greeting for a particular situation out of 30 implies the existence of 29 wrong ones: 29 new ways to give offence.
So uh, make of that what you will.
I think I’ve broken the habit, but I used to apologize for things which were clearly the other person’s fault and as far as I can tell, my motivation was a strong feeling that an apology was supposed to happen, and if the other person didn’t supply it, I would.
This was a fairly strong and very fast reflex.
It seems plausible that it was the result of niceness training done a little too young or unthinkingly.
You make it sound like the alternative, where everyone has idiosyncratic notions of what is acceptable and unacceptable and there’s no way to generalize from one person to another, leads to less offense being taken.
I guess that would be true if everyone treated every possible utterance as inoffensive. Which, OK, if you can get a community to actually do that, great… but it’s far from easy to pull off.
Otherwise, not so much.
The point of etiquette is to avoid giving offense unintentionally.
When everyone knows the rules, we don’t think of it as following rules of etiquette, we think of it as not being a jerk.
I don’t follow at all.
The point is that in a culture where one is expected to greet someone by saying X if the other is male and above you in status, Y if they are female and above, Z if they’re a blacksmith… etc. it is much easier to give offence by accidentally using the wrong greeting than in one where you greet people with X regardless of the situation.
How does having simpler rules lead to “idiosyncratic notions of what is acceptable and unacceptable”? We seem to do fine without a rule on how to greet a one-legged chess player on a tuesday.
Sure, if what you mean by “a culture with low levels of (expected) politeness” is one in which there is one standard greeting, X, with which you greet people “regardless of the situation,” then you’re absolutely correct: that is not at all idiosyncratic.
I guess I misunderstood you: I thought you were proposing an approach where people just greet one another however they wish and they don’t worry about etiquette at all, rather than an approach where there is a single approved way of greeting everyone.
The former I think does lead to idiosyncratic standards; the latter I agree does not.
Sorry for the confusion and thanks for the clarification.
(Assuming you mean “not the apologizer’s fault” in the last one.) I don’t do these things, and I don’t think they’re necessary forms of courtesy, at least in a peer situation—customer service calls for jumping through hoops sometimes but I don’t think that’s what we’re discussing.
I suspect that I’m similar to most people in that I notice mostly when someone uses a politeness level which is not what I wanted. ;) I’m not sure what terms I could use to clarify what that level is, though.
I guess it would be when you don’t have enough skill to speak both politely and clearly. So your actual choice is just between “bluntly” and “inarticulately”.
The long-term solution to this situation is to develop the necessary skill. But the person may misunderstand the nature of situation; s/he may not understand the it’s the missing skill that causes this kind of dilemma.
So, Viliam_Bur, do I understand correctly?
You are saying the major tradeoff isn’t between:
Speak ‘bluntly’ in situation X
Speak ‘politely’ in situation X
It is between:
Speak ‘bluntly’ in every situation (default)
Invest effort to learn to speak more ‘politely’
(The costs-benefit calculation is a long-term one performed over all potential situations, not a short-term one performed over each specific situation)
I agree; this makes sense to me.
In certain cases, bluntness can be useful. However, by this I mean it can be useful if you are able to let people be blunt to you. See Crocker’s Rules and the related article on Radical Honesty.
If everyone in a certain social context operate on such a system (whether explicitly or implicitly), then there is some benefit to these people in terms of saving time and cognitive effort in the short term, and in the long term if they haven’t yet spent time on developing ‘politeness’.
No, I was saying that a good long-term solution is not helpful in a short term.
Let’s suppose that I completely agree with you that politeness is always the best solution. But to reach that level of politeness, a person starting from my position would have to visit therapy, then a social skill course, a presentation skill course, a diplomacy course, and this all would take at least two years. As a good rationalists I immediately join the therapy and book the courses. But how am I going to solve all the situations during those two years?
It does not help me to know that two years later I will have a perfect solution for a situation that is happening now. Therefore, during those two years, I may solve the situations bluntly, when I think it is better than not speaking at all.
Now that I’ve seen the issue framed in those terms, I can think of several cases where someone spent so long on niceness-padding that I got annoyed, lost interest, or interrupted to ask them to get to the point. I would like to add that the niceness/efficiency tradeoff is continuous, not discrete, bounded on the maximally-efficient end and unbounded on the maximally-nice end, and that there must be some amount of niceness-padding so excessive that will annoy even those who prefer prefer more of it in general.
Oh, yes, I’ll certainly agree with that. Even the examples in the original post were a little too fluffy for my taste, and I’m the one who’s a stickler for courtesy. There’s certainly a balance to be struck—enough, but no more—which I haven’t emphasized enough for how important it is. Thanks for the reminder.
I wonder how much striking that balance is part of the skill of being useful and courteous at the same time.