Really? To me, it depends substantially on how the list is generated. If we try to “rip from the headlines,” I’d expect substantial disagreement. If we follow you around and watch you tell people what to do in your ordinary week, I expect more agreement.
In short, there are lots of points of disagreement about social interaction, but there are far more mundane and uncontroversial interactions than controversial ones.
Well, I certainly agree that it’s possible to generate a list of a hundred cases that 95% of people would agree on the classification of.
But if you followed me around for a week and picked samples randomly from that (both of cases where I tell people what to do, and cases where I could have told people what to do and didn’t), and you asked a hundred people, I expect you’d get <60% congruence. I work in an office full of Americans and Israelis, I am frequently amused and sometimes horrified by the spread of opinion on this sort of thing.
Of course, if you narrowed your sample to middle-class Americans, you might well get up above 90%.
Edit: I should explicitly admit, though, that I was not envisioning a randomly generated list of cases. It was a good question.
I had something a set of mundane cases in mind. My post was just meant to point out that discerning these sorts of situations is not something we use a set of rules or criteria for (at least no fixed set we could usefully enumerate), but most people are socially competant enough to tell the difference.
I agree that most people who share what you’re calling “social competence” within a given culture share a set of rules that determine acceptable utterances in that culture, and that those rules are difficult to enumerate.
Really? To me, it depends substantially on how the list is generated. If we try to “rip from the headlines,” I’d expect substantial disagreement. If we follow you around and watch you tell people what to do in your ordinary week, I expect more agreement.
In short, there are lots of points of disagreement about social interaction, but there are far more mundane and uncontroversial interactions than controversial ones.
Hm.
Well, I certainly agree that it’s possible to generate a list of a hundred cases that 95% of people would agree on the classification of.
But if you followed me around for a week and picked samples randomly from that (both of cases where I tell people what to do, and cases where I could have told people what to do and didn’t), and you asked a hundred people, I expect you’d get <60% congruence. I work in an office full of Americans and Israelis, I am frequently amused and sometimes horrified by the spread of opinion on this sort of thing.
Of course, if you narrowed your sample to middle-class Americans, you might well get up above 90%.
Edit: I should explicitly admit, though, that I was not envisioning a randomly generated list of cases. It was a good question.
I had something a set of mundane cases in mind. My post was just meant to point out that discerning these sorts of situations is not something we use a set of rules or criteria for (at least no fixed set we could usefully enumerate), but most people are socially competant enough to tell the difference.
I agree that most people who share what you’re calling “social competence” within a given culture share a set of rules that determine acceptable utterances in that culture, and that those rules are difficult to enumerate.