Translator: Kumika Moore Reviewer: Tanya Cushman Hello. As was just said, I am an immigrant from America to the United Kingdom. I've been here for 12 years.
And as somebody who is a student and a researcher interested in - well, as a student of life in that sense - interested in how people communicate - wow! - there's a lot to look at when you're a foreigner in a culture. And there's a lot to think about.
So, I want to talk about politeness today, and how the British and Americans interact, and about the concepts we have about ourselves as who are the polite ones and who are the impolite ones? Okay, and I say this having a lot of English friends who go to my country, and they come back, and they say things like: 'Oh, I really enjoyed my visit in America, but I'm so glad to be back in the land of "please" and "thank you". ' (Laughter) My friend Julie, who's over here, is always explaining English behaviours to me in terms of 'Oh, it's the British innate politeness that accounts for these things.
' But at the same time, 'Skyscanner', an internet travel agent, recently did a survey asking British travellers 'What are the rudest countries to visit? ' 'Who's most unfriendly to you? ' Okay, who did the British vote unfriendly?
The French, the Russians, and number three, the British, okay? So you've got this notion of Britain being a very polite culture, at the same time being a very rude culture. I love to use Google autocomplete as a research device.
Look at what happens when you research 'American people are'. (Laughter) There are a lot of really not very nice stereotypes about American people there. And of course, stereotypes usually have a grain of truth.
But notice, 'friendly' is there. 'Friendly' is there. 'Rude' is there.
But 'friendly' is there first. What do you think it says for English people? 'Cold', 'rude', 'arrogant' .
. . (Laughter) I can't account for the German, but .
. . a lot of really negative things there about interacting with people.
So I want to look at that and want to ask what's going on? Why are we like this? What it all comes down to is that any time you are interacting with somebody, you are behaving according to the politeness system that you've learned, and a lot of unspoken, hidden beliefs about what it means to be a person, what it means to have an interaction, what it means to have a relationship; all these sort of things that are hidden that we don't know we know.
But we act on the basis of those beliefs all the time. When you are interacting with somebody who comes from a different system than you, with different cultural beliefs about how these things work, you're likely to have miscommunication because somebody is assuming that you are - when you interact with other people you assume that you've got some base beliefs in common. But if the level [is] so basic that you don't even realise you have them, you're very likely not to realise that the other person doesn't have them.
And once you have these miscommunications repeatedly, you end up with stereotypes. That interaction didn't go the way I'd expected it to, so those people must be stupider than we are, or they must be ruder than we are, or something like that. I want to talk about this in terms of linguistic politeness theory, which starts out taking a lot of ideas from anthropology.
And one of the notions it takes from there is the notion of 'face', which is a notion you'll know from expressions like 'I lost face in an interaction', 'I saved some face. ' That sort of thing. Well, in politeness theory - the one I'm talking about is a big one, by Brown and Levinson - the notion of face is made more complex.
We each have two aspects to our face. We're sort of Janus-like creatures who have both a positive and a negative face. These are just labels.
It doesn't mean the good face and the bad face. But we've got these two competing forces in what we want out of interactions. Your positive face is your desire to be appreciated, to be valued, to feel like you belong.
So, to feel that other people like you. Your negative face is your desire to act unimpeded, to be a free agent, to not to have to take other people's feelings into consideration when you want to do what you want to do. We all have both of these desires sort of, you know, fighting it out when we interact with somebody: 'Oh, should I ask them?
' 'I want this thing from them, but would it be too much of an imposition on their negative face? ' etc. So we're always judging these things when we interact, and anytime we interact, it is a face threatening event, right?
I say, 'Excuse me, can you tell me the time? ' I've taken your freedom away from you just by engaging you in a conversation. It's threatened your negative face.
I tell you, 'I disagree with you. ' I've threatened your positive face. So these kinds of - this complication of the notion of face allows different kinds of politeness cultures to develop.
And you could have a politeness culture that is based on exchanging positive face very readily. So you still have your negative-face needs too, but you prioritise positive-face exchanges in interactions more than other cultures might. And this ends up giving you a sense of belonging and equality in interactions so everybody is on the same level.
There's trying to create this sense of comradery in interactions. And this results in interactions feeling like they've got a lot of familiarity in them - informality. The other thing that we could have is a deference politeness system, which puts more emphasis on the negative-face aspects.
And in that case, it's usually found in a more hierarchical society, or it goes with social hierarchies. So, you're emphasising there the differences between people. We're not all equal.
We have different roles in our interaction, in our society. So, this is going to give more of a sense of formality. It's also associated with more indirect communication.
So, you've got those two things going on. One thing to say about deference politeness systems is they are more stable because they're based on these social hierarchies that have come up over centuries, whereas solidarity politeness systems are often found in new cultures. So, as you've probably guessed here, the United States is very much a poster child for solidarity cultures, way on the solidarity end of the continuum.
Added to this, the United States has a fierce sense of individualism. So your identity is based on you as an individual. It's 'I'm not who I am - being who I am isn't being Paul's daughter.
It's being [me]. ' So, we have this individualism, this need for positive-face exchanges in interactions, which give us very loose social networks. We're trying to get as much positive face from as many different people as we can.
Deference politeness system, the way on the deference end you're going to find things like East Asian cultures, where in Japan, the social hierarchy is built into the language where you've got grammatical agreement markers for what your role is in the interaction. The UK - not that far down the deference scale, but a lot more deference-oriented than America is. And added to this, in the UK, their own particular brand of deference politeness system includes a really strong sense of personal privacy or (spoken with a British accent) privacy, if you prefer.
A great way to illustrate this is what happens with personal names. So, Americans meet in a bar, don't know each other. Within three sentences, they'll be exchanging names.
They'll be saying, 'Oh, and by the way, I'm Lynne from Rochester. ' And the conversation proceeds from there. Whereas in an English pub, people will spend all evening talking to each other and never exchange names.
Maybe if they've really appreciated the interaction, they'll exchange names at the end. But to give somebody your name is to give them a bit of yourself. That's an affront to your privacy.
You're careful with that decision in a way that Americans wouldn't be careful about it. Okay, so a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So the question is who's polite?
Who's sincere? What happens when we interact with each other? Who's friendly?
Okay, I'm going to look at two kinds of behaviours here to illustrate this: complimenting and thanking. So compliments - Americans give a lot of them, right? That's the other thing my English friends say to me.
When they come back from America, they say, 'Oh, everybody was so lovely, but after a while, I just got sick of the insincerity. ' 'How can they really love everything that much? ' 'I got sick of the enthusiasm.
' You know, because Americans are! They meet you and say, 'Oh wow! I love your shoes', 'Oh!
I love your name', 'Oh, I love your voice', 'I love your accent. ' So, you get all of this all the time in American compliments. Well, why do Americans give a lot of compliments?
It's because it's the easiest way to give people positive face, to say 'I value something about you. ' So, in a positive-face exchanging culture, you need to do that a lot. If it's missing, you notice it, but you don't realise you're noticing it.
So, when I moved away from the U. S. , at first I was teaching in South Africa, and I felt like everybody hated me.
And I was convinced that my students had absolutely no time for me. And then at the end of the year, I got the student evaluations, and they were great. That's when it sunk in.
I was used to getting constant feedback from American students about what they liked, and I wasn't getting that in another culture. It's really sort of essential to your own sense of self to have that positive-face flow in this kind of culture. It's so important that we don't mess around with it.
So we don't go around saying things like, 'Your eyes are like the stars that God made', or anything like that. 85% of American compliments are in one of three grammatical patterns, so it makes them really recognisable, makes them sort of repetitive. But, you know, there you are.
There they are. We're doing them. Are they insincere?
They might be a bit exaggerated. We like to say 'love' and things like that. We like to say 'awesome'.
(Laughter) But, you know, exaggeration is no less sincere than understatement, which, of course, the British are famous for. Or irony, right? Irony and understatement - other ways of being insincere.
So, there's a core truth though. If I'm complimenting you on something, I mean that I like that something. If I say, 'I like your shoes', I'm not just making it up.
I like your shoes. Part of the reason why English friends will find this insincere is because they think 'How can they like me? ' 'How can all this liking be going on all the time?
' 'How can they be so positive all the time? ' And the reason we can do that is because we compartmentalise people. If I tell you I like your shoes or even if I like your idea, it doesn't mean I like you.
(Laughter) It means that I found something that we can have a sense of belonging about, that we can have a sense of valuing each other about, that we can progress in our communication from there. So, I've established some goodwill in our conversation. The other thing my English friends say to me is 'We're so bad at accepting compliments.
' Well, it's not actually true. English people accept compliments more often than American people do, according to one study by Bob Herbert. So .
. . and by accept, I mean saying 'thank you', or acknowledging or agreeing with the compliment.
But why English people don't like all these compliments is because they are an affront to privacy, right? If I tell you I like something about you, it means I noticed something about you. And that can feel invasive if you don't already know the person kind of well, if you don't have this sort of positive-face openness.
But Americans - and the British do this too, but what Herbert found was that the Americans do it at greater rates - will do something in responding to a compliment that involves not accepting the compliment. So, I might give you a compliment back. I might downgrade what you complimented me on.
'Yeah, you might like these shoes, but they're really uncomfortable. ' Or I'll tell you how you could be like me and have this complimentable thing too: 'Oh, I got it at Asda. You can afford it too.
' So those sorts of things we do. Why? If it's about having positive face, shouldn't I want positive things said about myself?
Well, yes I do. Here's where I get insincere. I do want you saying positive things about me.
But once you've said something positive about me, you've put me on a pedestal. And our interaction has to be about equality. We all know we're not equal, but we have to act like we're equal.
So once you've put me up on a pedestal, I have to take myself back down to the level I was at, or bring you up on the pedestal with me to keep that sense of equality going on. So that's complimenting. I've got a few minutes more left for where I started - thanking.
And thanking, of course, I said, that's what British people often miss when they go to America: 'Please' and 'thank you'. And I was at the bank the other day trying to change my address, I lost interest in counting at the twelfth 'thank you' that happened between the guy and me. We were only halfway through the interaction.
'Thank you, thank you, thank you'. And the reason why this is possible is because 'thank you' no longer means thank you in British culture. Dell Hymes, the sociolinguistic, wrote this 40 years ago, saying that 'thank you' in British culture is becoming semantically an emptier phrase.
It no longer associates with gratitude. In many contexts, it's just a marker of segments in an interaction. Americans say 'thank you' less because, to them, it means gratitude.
And you feel gratitude less often than you have to mark these segments in a conversation. British people feel uncomfortable when they're in this situation because they miss those markers. That's what gives you your compass in an interaction, having the markers that you're used to having.
But, you know, it's not - this, at least, is not evidence. Thanking behaviour is not evidence of greater gratitude in one culture or another. Here's an actual example of a British shop interaction.
It's just the end of it. But a guy has gone into a shop. The shop is closing so they won't sell him anything.
But he asked the price of the thing. And the shopkeeper tells him the price, and he thanks him for the price. Okay, so there maybe he is grateful for the price.
But then what's the real response to 'thanks'? Well, it's 'thank you. ' Or maybe there's 'Thank you for your interest.
' But it's getting harder to see a gratitude meaning here. Response to 'thank you' was 'thank you. ' The response to 'thank you' was 'thank you.
' The response to 'thank you' was 'thanks. ' So what's happened here - and this happens all the time, right? You order a latte, there are eight 'thank you's.
What's happening here is they're just sort of establishing that nobody's got anything else to say. (Laughter) This is why - I mean this happens in probably all cultures. You don't just walk away from a conversation, right?
That's a positive-face threat to somebody; that's saying I'm rejecting you. So you want to go back and forth a little bit and make sure 'Okay, nothing else is going to go on here. ' And the British do this in these kinds of interactions with 'thank you.
' You could substitute 'okay' there for the last four in an American interaction, right? So that's indicating there is no gratitude meaning there. There's just acknowledgement meaning there.
So, that's thanking. So, who's the rudest? Wrong question.
What we've got is different hidden cultural scripts, and we're being polite in different ways. One thing I've forgot to say about this solidarity politeness system is it's been said that it's an escalating and addictive kind of system; to get positive face from people, it's hard to resist. It makes you feel good.
And so you do see more and more solidarity politeness behaviours, especially in Facebook and places like that, when you watch people interact. That's happening now. But I have to end this the only way I can: [Thank you.
Thank you. You're awesome! Thank you.
