greenpass: Manners (or, how can I make people like me?)

September 04, 2004

Manners (or, how can I make people like me?)

One thing that I was lucky enough never to be saddled with growing up was the relegation to the peer group – the literal and metaphorical “kid’s table” that can be so detrimental to the development of a young person’s manners, let alone their conversational skills or knowledge.

After a while, and especially if you attend certain types of schools, one learns what are called “manners” in Europe but don’t seem to have an equivalent here – the code of interaction and conversational methods that are intended to bring minds together but to maintain a safety barrier or buffer zone of personal information (hence not asking personal questions, not talking about salaries etc.) Discretion is highly valued.

In diplomatic circles this is taken a step further by codification, and they call it “protocol” – a blueprint to maintaining good relations and efficiently smoothing over any untoward or unwelcome social wrinkles. The buffer zone maintained by protocol is even larger than the one maintained by manners, and hopefully guarantees diplomatic niceties by preserving an aloof detachment from local problems (all the while evincing a deep and compassionate interest).

It couldn’t have been clearer than at the RNC that many Americans today don’t possess the attribute of “manners” in the European sense. There was very little honest discussion of policy (although there was discussion of tactical problems), but lots and lots and lots of personalization of the GOP. The manners that were lacking were not in the vein in which many Southerners criticize Yankees – the lack of honourifics, the unbroachable topics of religion or politics, the presents and the thoughtful gifts. American manners (and its more casual cousin “politeness”) are a different sort of social interaction that is aimed at ingratiating, at ensuring that people like you (or at least feel obligated to like you).

European manners, because they presume the maintenance of a certain level of personal detachment, are aimed at maintaining the interaction and the flow of exchange of ideas, but the idea of wanting people to like you doesn’t enter into the equation. Americans approach from exactly the opposite end of the spectrum. Far too often this degenerates into the cliché of the American tourist who pours out his own life and story to complete strangers at the drop of a hat. “Wanting people to like you” gets translated into “making a personal connection” which then becomes, perversely, “exchanging a lot of personal information”. As a result, Europeans often laugh at Americans for naively telling their life story to everyone who comes by, and Americans feel hurt by Europeans who seem so cold and unfriendly all the time because they refuse to engage in the personal information exchange (hence the perception of Gallic rudeness, Teutonic aloofness, British reserve, and the garrulous American).

The interesting thing about my theory here is that it’s backed up with hard cognitive statistical data – a corpus of information that has been built up to better design surveys for the national census and other information gathering tools like focus groups. It’s a fact that the vast majority of the time, you can ask Europeans about religion, political views, and especially salary and how much they’re making, and they’ll answer very candidly and truthfully. However, any question about their sex lives and the interviewer often has to resort to underhanded framing questions or cues to get them to answer at all.

Americans do the exact opposite – they’re extraordinarily candid about their sex lives (the researchers often noted dryly that more information was volunteered than was necessary for the purposes of the survey) and will answer political and religious questions cautiously, if at all. It’s the financial questions that people balk at, either because they’re ashamed of making too little or have social anxiety about making too much. Making too much or too little money than someone else often seems like an excellent way to get someone to dislike you, in the same way that Harvard grads often say “I went to school in…Boston” because of the immediate and negative judgment often passed on them. As a result there are a number of techniques that have been developed to get people to answer financial questions.*

This is why Europeans can talk about religion and politics without the vitriol and the anger. They don’t see manners as having a dimension of personal connection, and therefore are far less likely to take it personally if someone starts talking about a contentious issue that people will disagree with. Americans often take an attack on their ideas as an attack on them personally, which can be a huge disadvantage as it precludes a sober examination of how those ideas are constructed and where they originate from. More than one Republican has told me that their beliefs stem from their family background (the “It’s my culture/way of life” argument) rather than from any intellectual cogitation.

I worry that until Americans are able to incorporate some of the European detachment, at least where politics is concerned, that they won’t be able to successfully get anything done (on both sides of the aisle). One of Rumsfeld’s famous rules once admonished readers not to get too caught up in partisanship – to get up and keep on doing your job and keep communicating, because the other side is also just doing its job. This (and a reading now of many of Rumsfeld’s rules) seems to me to be a rare blast of European-style political manners that has since been lost. The personal politics that took its place are a natural offshoot of what I think is many American’s rather wrong-headed conception of the correct way to interact and exchange ideas.

*For example, one national government survey hands people a sealed booklet that says on the outside “Supplement #(####)” with no mention of salary. The interviewer says, “You have a unique booklet there, with no identifying markings on it for me except its unique numerical ID. It’s never been opened and it will be resealed after you look at it. Inside there’s a list of numbers of yearly income, followed by a letter. Look down the list and without showing me, tell me which letter represents what you earn.” Inside the booklet, another technique that’s often used is to make $0-1,000 (a), $1,000-2,000 (b), etc, so that by the time you get to your $32,000 or whatever you make, you’re way over at (ff) which doesn’t look too bad, so people don’t worry about saying, “I’m an ff” or “I’m a q”. Yet another technique is to leave the question for the very last minute of a half hour or one hour interview, and then to say “I’m going to ask you one last question and if you don’t answer then I’m afraid we’re going to have to discard the entire survey. What is your annual income?” If they still say they won’t answer, the interviewer then says “Well, just tell me if it’s above or below $30,000,” and then continues to push for some sort of metric.

Posted at 01:25 PM in General Knowledge | Permalink

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Zoe Vanderwolk argues in an interesting post that "European" manners are different from American ones, especially in terms of what people are willing to discuss with relative strangers. I think this is a serious over-generalization. Take this from the ... [Read More]

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