I have been thinking about this topic a lot on my own and with friends before finding this post and was excited to see a post so related to my recent thoughts. One idea that came up in a recent discussion with a friend was that the pitfalls of the reasonable good faith effort in connection with common communication norms, especially if somebody reveals a secret accidentally and is feeling vulnerable and then asks you to keep it secret. In that case, if you say, “I’ll make a good faith effort to keep it but I can’t promise” it may be interpreted as “I don’t care about the privacy of your secret.” What the person is actually wanting to hear is something more like “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.” There is a social expectation of some degree of fallibility, and depending on the social context, pointing to this fallibility may overemphasize it and be interpreted differently from how it is intended. All this is very context-dependent.
I have been thinking about this topic a lot on my own and with friends before finding this post and was excited to see a post so related to my recent thoughts. One idea that came up in a recent discussion with a friend was that the pitfalls of the reasonable good faith effort in connection with common communication norms, especially if somebody reveals a secret accidentally and is feeling vulnerable and then asks you to keep it secret. In that case, if you say, “I’ll make a good faith effort to keep it but I can’t promise” it may be interpreted as “I don’t care about the privacy of your secret.” What the person is actually wanting to hear is something more like “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.” There is a social expectation of some degree of fallibility, and depending on the social context, pointing to this fallibility may overemphasize it and be interpreted differently from how it is intended. All this is very context-dependent.