Social messaging is fine balancing act: people like to offload responsibility and effort, especially if it doesn’t come at the cost of status. And, to be honest, you don’t know if your question would impose upon the other (in terms of cognitive load, social pressure or responsibility), so you it is smart to start your social bid low and see if the other wants to raise the price. Sometimes they work, creating a feedback loop similar to how superstitions evolve: if it is minimal effort and sometimes it is effective, better continue using it.
As a child, I despised a lot of these practices, to me it felt like people were lying all the time, or at least, hiding their true motivations or concerns. I tended to simply call out these adults on their bullshit. If somebody said “I’m fine with everything”, I simply proposed something that I know that person is not fine with but that is absurd enough to indicate that I’m not being serious. As a child you can still get away with such behaviour, but many adults find it highly annoying. However, I still employ it among friends who I know don’t judge me on that interaction or at least lace it with humor to make it socially acceptable.
However, I think such messaging can often turn into a social communication into a prisoner’s dilemma type situation, where each party puts in the minimum succesfull effort resulting in a situation unsatisfactory to either party. I’m just not sure how (and if) we are able to recognize when a situation is a prisoner’s dillema and when not. “How was your week?” is often a very welcoming question to me, but not for others.
Leaving things unspoken and relying on generally accepted principles can increase communication efficiency enormously, a lot of communication isn’t a prisoner’s dilemma type exchange after all, but it will run into issues occasionally, especially if the communicator do not share a set of unspoken rules.
Having grown up in Dutch culture, I was unusually direct (rude) for even a Dutch person, so travelling in Iran where things are absurdly polite at times was very interesting for me, for example. However, a society like Iran requires quite an amount of cognitive load for even simple issues.
Social messaging is fine balancing act: people like to offload responsibility and effort, especially if it doesn’t come at the cost of status. And, to be honest, you don’t know if your question would impose upon the other (in terms of cognitive load, social pressure or responsibility), so you it is smart to start your social bid low and see if the other wants to raise the price. Sometimes they work, creating a feedback loop similar to how superstitions evolve: if it is minimal effort and sometimes it is effective, better continue using it.
As a child, I despised a lot of these practices, to me it felt like people were lying all the time, or at least, hiding their true motivations or concerns. I tended to simply call out these adults on their bullshit. If somebody said “I’m fine with everything”, I simply proposed something that I know that person is not fine with but that is absurd enough to indicate that I’m not being serious. As a child you can still get away with such behaviour, but many adults find it highly annoying. However, I still employ it among friends who I know don’t judge me on that interaction or at least lace it with humor to make it socially acceptable.
However, I think such messaging can often turn into a social communication into a prisoner’s dilemma type situation, where each party puts in the minimum succesfull effort resulting in a situation unsatisfactory to either party. I’m just not sure how (and if) we are able to recognize when a situation is a prisoner’s dillema and when not. “How was your week?” is often a very welcoming question to me, but not for others.
Leaving things unspoken and relying on generally accepted principles can increase communication efficiency enormously, a lot of communication isn’t a prisoner’s dilemma type exchange after all, but it will run into issues occasionally, especially if the communicator do not share a set of unspoken rules.
Having grown up in Dutch culture, I was unusually direct (rude) for even a Dutch person, so travelling in Iran where things are absurdly polite at times was very interesting for me, for example. However, a society like Iran requires quite an amount of cognitive load for even simple issues.