The Guessing-game Rule

It is not considered entirely polite, for example, to ask someone directly 'What do you do?', although if you think about it, this is the most obvious question to put to a new acquaintance, and the easiest way to start a conversation. But in addition to our privacy scruples, we English seem to have a perverse need to make social life difficult for ourselves, so etiquette requires us to find a more roundabout, indirect way of discovering what people do for a living. It can be most amusing to listen to the tortured and devious lengths to which English people will go to ascertain a new acquaintance's profession without actually asking the forbidden question. The guessing game, which is played at almost every middle-class social gathering where people are meeting each other for the first time, involves attempting to guess a person's occupation from 'clues' in remarks made about other matters.

A comment about traffic problems in the local area, for example, will elicit the response 'Oh, yes, it's a nightmare - and the rush hour is even worse: do you drive to work?' The other person knows exactly what question is really intended, and will usually obligingly answer the unspoken enquiry as well as the spoken one, saying something like: 'Yes, but I work at the hospital, so at least I don't have to get into the town centre.' The questioner is now allowed to make a direct guess: 'Oh, the hospital - you're a doctor, then?' (When two or three possible occupations are indicated, it is polite to name the highest-status one as a first guess - doctor rather than nurse, porter or medical student; solicitor rather than secretary. Also, even though an explicit guess is permitted at this stage, it is best expressed as an interrogative statement, rather than as a direct question.)

Everyone knows the rules of this game, and most people tend to offer helpful 'clues' early in the conversation, to speed the process along. Even if you are shy, embarrassed about your job, or trying to be enigmatic, it is considered very rude to prolong the clue-hunting stage of the game for too long, and once someone makes an explicit guess, you are obliged to reveal your occupation. It is almost equally impolite to ignore any obvious 'clue- dropping' by your new acquaintance. If (to continue the medical theme) he or she mentions in passing that 'My surgery is just round the corner from here', you are honour-bound to hazard a guess: 'Oh, so - you're a GP?'

When the person's occupation is finally revealed, it is customary, however boring or predictable this occupation might be, to express surprise. The standard response to 'Yes, I am a doctor [or teacher, accountant, IT manager, secretary, etc.]' is 'Oh, rea///?!' as though the occupation were both unexpected and fascinating. This is almost invariably followed by an embarrassed pause, as you search desperately for an appropriate comment or question about the person's profession - and he or she tries to think of something modest, amusing, but somehow also impressive, to say in response.

Similar guessing-game techniques are often used to find out where people live, whether they are married, what school or university they went to, and so on. Some direct questions are more impolite than others. It is less rude, for example, to ask 'Where do you live?' than 'What do you do?', but even this relatively inoffensive question is much better phrased in a more indirect manner, such as 'Do you live nearby?', or even more obliquely 'Have you come far?' It is more acceptable to ask whether someone has children than to ask whether he or she is married, so the former question is generally used as a roundabout way of prompting clues that will provide the answer to the latter. (Many married English males do not wear wedding rings, so the children question is often used by single females to encourage them to reveal their marital status. This can only be done in an appropriate conversational context, however, as asking the children question 'out of the blue' would be too obvious an attempt to ascertain a male's availability.)

The guessing-game rituals allow us, eventually, to elicit this kind of rudimentary census-form information, but the English privacy rules ensure that any more interesting details about our lives and relationships are reserved for close friends and family. This is 'privileged' information, not to be bandied about indiscriminately. The English take a certain pride in this trait, and sneer at the stereotyped Americans who 'tell you all about their divorce, their hysterectomy and their therapist within five minutes of meeting you'. This cliche, although not entirely without foundation, probably tells us more about the English and our privacy rules than it does about the Americans.

Incidentally, the English privacy rules, especially the taboo on 'prying', can make life quite difficult for the hapless social researcher whose life-blood data can only be obtained by constant prying. Many of the findings in this book were discovered the hard way, by pulling metaphorical teeth, or, more often, desperately trying to find sneaky tricks and stratagems that would help me to get round the privacy rules. Still, the process of devising and experimenting with such tricks led me to the identification of some unexpected and interesting rules, such as the distance rule.

The Distance Rule

Among the English, gossip about one's own private doings is reserved for intimates; gossip about the private lives of friends and family is shared with a slightly wider social circle; gossip about the personal affairs of acquaintances, colleagues and neighbours with a larger group; and gossip about the intimate details of public figures' or celebrities' lives with almost anyone. This is the distance rule. The more 'distant' from you the subject of gossip, the wider the circle of people with whom you may gossip about that person.

The distance rule allows gossip to perform its vital social functions - social bonding; clarification of position and status; assessment and management of reputations; transmission of social skills, norms and values - without undue invasion of privacy. More importantly, it also allows nosey-parker anthropologists to formulate their prying questions in such a roundabout manner as to bypass the privacy rules.

If, for example, you want to find out about an English person's attitudes and feelings on a sensitive subject, such as, say, marriage, you do not ask about his or her own marriage - you talk about someone else's marriage, preferably that of a remote public figure not personally known to either of you. When you are better acquainted with the person, you can discuss the domestic difficulties of a colleague or neighbour, or perhaps even a friend or relative. (If you do not happen to have colleagues or relatives with suitably dysfunctional marriages, you can always invent these people.)

The Reciprocal Disclosure Strategy

If you are determined to find out about your new English friend's own marital relations, or any other 'private' matter, you will probably have to resort to the Reciprocal Disclosure Strategy. There is a more or less universal rule whereby people almost unconsciously try to achieve some degree of symmetry or balance in their conversations, such that if you tell them something about your own 'private' life, the other person will feel obliged, if only out of reflex politeness, to reciprocate with a comparably personal disclosure. You can then gradually escalate the level of intimacy by making your next disclosure somewhat more revealing, in the hope of eliciting an equivalent response, and so on.

Among the English, however, you would be advised to start with a very minor, trivial disclosure - something that barely counts as 'private' at all, and that can be dropped into the conversation casually - and work up, step by step, from this innocuous starting point. The Reciprocal Disclosure Strategy is a laborious, painstaking procedure, but it is often the only way of tricking the English into breaking their privacy taboos.

You might find it quite an amusing experiment, though, to pick the most reserved, buttoned-up English people you can find, and see just how far you can get them to unbend using this technique. Being English myself, I often found it easier to make up my 'personal revelations' than to disclose anything about my real private life. I am sorry to bring my profession into disrepute by admitting to such deceptions, but this would not be an honest account of my research if I neglected to mention all the lies I told.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1462