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"It is a happy talent to know how to play."

Saying “Thank You” Is a Form of Negative Politeness

3/4/2017

5 Comments

 
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“The Thai culture is very polite.”

I read and heard this from several sources before embarking upon my Southeast Asia trip. It didn’t take long to see why. Between the head bowing, the wais, and the clear order of heirarchy in every restaurant and hotel you visit, it’s hard to miss the culture’s politeness.
Lao politeness was even more obvious. My very first day in the country, I took a Mekong Smile Cruise slowboat from Chiang Khong, Thailand, to Luang Pragang, Laos. (Read about why it’s my favorite thing I did on the whole trip.) As I admired the views of rain forest, jungle, and mountains all around me, I chatted with another passenger, who was sitting on the other side of the aisle.

While we were talking, the Lao chef on our boat needed to pass between us. Instead of just walking by, she ducked down, super low, and shuffled, as though she thought I was taking a photo and she was trying not to be in it.

Except I clearly wasn’t taking a photo. But… maybe she thought I was?
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Nope. A few minutes later, she had to head back to the stern of the boat, and she did the same thing again. She wasn’t trying to stay out of my non-existent photo. She was trying to make sure her head was lower than mine, because I was her customer, and this was "polite."

Having witnessed this, and having studied psycholinguistics at Stanford, I would make a minor correction to the first sentence of this article.

“The Thai culture is very negatively polite.”

As I explained recently in If You’re Not a Psychologist, “Positive Reinforcement” Probably Means the OPPOSITE of What You Think It Does,

In English, we use the words “positive” and “negative” all the time. Colloquially, these words often mean “good” and “bad.” But in psychology, that’s not what they mean. Instead, “positive” means you add something, and “negative” means you take something away.  Read more >

That post proceeds to explain the difference between positive and negative reinforcement, as well as positive and negative punishment.

But there’s also positive and negative politeness.

Positive politeness is politeness that aims to add closeness and warmth between people.

Negative politeness is politeness that takes away warmth and closeness, and instead establishes boundaries, respect, and hierarchy.

Undoubtedly, “please” is a polite thing to say. But it’s not positively polite. It’s negatively polite, because what you’re doing is acknowledging that the person you’re making a request of is an independent, autonomous person, with different wants and needs from you. You’re apologizing for imposing and showing respect. “I know you don’t have to, but could you please hand me that? I would appreciate it.”

Same with “thank you,” which really means, “I respect you; I know you didn’t have to do this for me, and I acknowledge and appreciate it.”

Please and thank you are about boundaries and respect -- which are the opposite of warmth and closeness.

So what would be an example of positive politeness?
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To answer that question, all I had to do was hop on a flight from Vientaine, Laos, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before I even left the airport, I’d sensed a glaring difference between the “politeness” in Malaysia and Thailand, even though the two are neighbors.

I’d decided to rent a car -- I was only staying a week, and I didn’t want to waste time waiting for buses and taking longer than necessary to get around. Except when I arrived at the airport (just days after that crazy Kim Jong Nam assassination -- and the North Korea airlines counter has already disappeared), I had no idea where to get the car.

I saw a few car rental agencies in my terminal, but none was the correct one. I asked one agent, “Where is Paradise?” He wasn’t sure -- so he took time out of his day to Google it for me, then showed me the instructions for where to meet them.

When I arrived at the meeting point (Door 1), no one was there. A taxi driver asked me if I needed a cab. I said I was waiting for the car rental people.

So he handed me his cell phone and said, “Call them. They might not know you’re here.”
I called, and a few minutes later, a kind woman arrived to take me to the rental car lot. She asked me several questions on the way, and seemed genuinely interested in my answers. When I was checking out the car, I asked if there were any with USB chargers.

“I have a converter you can borrow -- it plugs into the DC connector."

All three of my first encounters at KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) felt highly casual, warm, and trusting. I didn’t have to pay for or put a deposit down on the charger. The taxi driver actually walked away for a few minutes while I was using his phone -- and when he got a text from Paradise, he came to find me (it was hot, so I’d gone back inside the terminal to wait) and make sure I got the message.

After that, I drove to Cherating, the greatest little surf town in Malaysia. I had about 40 minutes until dark, and I was on the fence about renting a board. By the time I walk to the shop, pick a board, sign a waiver, and pay, it will be dark, I thought.

But… maybe it was worth a shot? I asked a man who was coming out of the water if he thought I had enough light to justify renting a board.

“You can use mine,” he offered. “I’m going to go eat, and then I’ll come back for it.”

And with that, he handed over his baby and disappeared into the sunset.

There were no “pleases” and “thank yous” in Malaysia, and I was a-okay with that.

​And! I totally have a new BFF now!

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I’m definitely not saying that positive politeness is better than negative politeness, or that Malaysian culture is a) universally like what I experienced or b) better than Thai and Lao culture. Only that there was a total major difference in how people interacted with me -- and it got me thinking about all those classes I took with psycholinguist Herb Clark. (Who, by the way, is one of the best teachers, researchers, mentors, and people ever.)

(Full disclosure: I feel a little awkward making these generalizations after only six weeks of travel. I’m sure there are aspects of each country I’ve visited that I never encountered, questions I’d’ve never thought to ask. But, as I wrote in People Who Say a Week is "Not Enough Time" To Travel are Silly and Wrong, a week is plenty of time to have conversations and start making observations and comparisons. If you don’t think so, maybe you’re not engaging enough or paying much attention.

Though, to be fair, I had to remind myself of my own advice when I was listening to Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World last week, and author Baz Dreisinger mentioned that she’d only spent about a week in each of the prisons she wrote about. I have many problems with her work, but the duration of her visits isn’t necessarily one of them.)

At this point, you’re probably wondering if I can give more examples of positive politeness.  It’s definitely harder to generate examples of this, since most of the rules and etiquette we follow are based on negative politeness. One example that comes to mind is giving someone a compliment, like, “Your performance was amazing.”

Or, perhaps, a reassuring touch when someone is nervous or sad.

Or juxtaposing criticism with compliments. (Even though, technically, negative feedback/positive punishment works better than positive feedback/positive reinforcement.)

Or, to use a recent example, offering to let someone carry your shortboard, so you can carry their longboard -- because you like them, and that would make life easier for them. (Yes, that's chivalrous. No, chivalry is not dead. Yes, I tend to be a pretty chivalrous woman.)
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But, of course, it totally depends on context. The same behavior can be positively or negatively polite -- just like the same behavior can be polite or impolite.

What do I mean by that?

Imagine you’ve been invited to a dinner party. Dinner is over. Do you:

a) Help with the dishes?
b) Not help with the dishes?

The answer should be, “It depends.”

If someone has invited you to come be fed and entertained in their home, perhaps you are showing them disrespect by helping with the dishes. You’re supposed to be playing BananaGrams in the living room. You're supposed to be chatting with the other guests. And maybe, just maybe, I don’t feel close enough with you that I want you going through all my kitchen cabinets. Maybe I don’t want you putting all my utensils back in the wrong place.

But perhaps the person is so close to me that they feel like family. Maybe they are family. Maybe they’ve had dinner here enough times that they know exactly where everything goes -- and I don’t care that they might see what a mess my kitchen is behind the scenes.

I would argue that helping with the dishes is a form of positive politeness (unless you’re crossing a boundary and being a little rude), while not helping is a form of negative politeness (unless you’re close enough that you’re supposed to be helping). But I’m sure plenty of readers disagree with me.

My next stop on this trip is Sri Lanka. Then, I’m headed to Burma. After that -- who knows? And I’m excited to keep observing, interacting, and learning about different forms of politeness along the way.

Want to know more? Check out my super-short travel story about an adventure in Croatia. It's called, Don't Say Don't Say "Thank You." Say, "It Is Delicious!" 

5 Comments
Zeph
3/17/2017 05:24:33 pm

Hi again,

Seems like most of what you call "positive politeness" would colloquially be called "kindness", and what you call "negative politeness" would be called "politeness".

I am not disputing the value of reflecting on the cultural differences you observed, but I wonder if redefining kindness/politeness as positive/negative politeness has increased our understanding or obscured it by creating a false dichotomy. You could have equally said that you experienced more politeness in Thai culture and more kindness in Laotian. And then reflected on that difference. I think it would have conveyed the concepts more easily.

I do understand your distinction between common usage of positive/negative and how they can be used in technical jargon. in engineering, positive and negative feedback mean something much closer to your usage in psychology, than to the common usage. Positive feedback increases a diversion from nominal, or the magnitude of an oscillation; negative feedback moves some measurement back towards normal or dampens an oscillation. "Positive" is associated with "runaway" while negative is associated with "stability".

But still, I find that positive/negative in this article and some other cases has an unintended semantic or emotive bleed-through. Even knowing the technical meaning, it's easy to "feel" a little differently about positive X and negative X.

This reminds me of my critique of some new-age or spiritual writers who describe some asserted flavors of "energy" in their conceptualization as "masculine" and "feminine", with the immediate assurance that they are in no way suggesting that males or females be associated with those because all people have both energies. Then they go on to write paragraph after paragraph where it's very clear that despite their assurance, they are at least unconsciously making just that association. Perhaps their intention is genuine, and they are just being seduced by the residual semantic charge - so I suggest to them that if the flavors of energy they are describing really should not be associated with male and female, they should just call them "green" and "blue" or "warm" and "cold" or some such, so as not to accidentally confuse the audience (or themselves). I think "positive" vs "negative" may also be inadvertantly tainted with carried semantic charge when discussing concepts with an audience outside our specialty. And that's another reason I would hesitate to rename kindness and politeness with positive/negative labels, unless that was the accepted convention for this context (eg: politness) within the speciality, and I was seeking to explain that established usage to people because they might encounter it again.

Still, it was nice to get this chance to reflect on the difference between politeness and kindness. I would say that politeness is a social lubricant which requires relatively little investment or emotional connection, while kindness is a deeper interpersonal interaction reflecting more of one's core and which may involve putting oneself out in a genuinely caring manner. As such, kindness does indeed do more to create authentic connection, than politeness which mostly reduces friction. I see them as having different roles, but not in any opposition to each other.

If you see some some unifying conceptual connection between kindness and politeness,characterized best with opposite polarities, then I would like to hear and understand that part better, because I did not get piece that from your presentation.

(It is becoming almost comical to me that I am writing yet another partial dissent, when actually on the whole I feel very supportive of your blog writings. I believe that with voice tone and body language, my attitude would be more clear - I really am not picking on you - not that you couldn't handle it if I was)

Reply
Eva Glasrud link
3/17/2017 07:25:18 pm

That's a good point -- this could have been simplified a lot by referring to kindness vs. politeness. I went with positive vs. negative politeness because it was a topic I enjoyed learning about in a psycholinguistics class, and it really made me think about the form and function politeness takes in different contexts.

For example, I became acquainted with this amazing family one summer, and we continued to develop our relationship through semi-regular dinner parties at their house. At first, I was very much a guest in their home. Helping with the dishes (to use that example) wouldn't have been appropriate. But one night after dinner, they asked me to drive their grandma home, and I gladly agreed. Their willingness to ask me for this small favor (even though it was "imposing" on me in some small way) made me feel like I'd moved from acquaintance to true family friend -- and from then on, it felt right to help with the dishes. All of these things are forms of "politeness," but they all signal different things about the relationship.

It is interesting how one small word choice (positive or negative) can have such a big impact on how we FEEL about words. But I'd definitely be lying if I said I weren't totally stoked on positive politeness after such an amazing trip to Malaysia, and I'm sure some of my own emotions about the difference bled through.

I'd say the connection between what we're now calling politeness vs. kindness is that they're BOTH meant to promote smooth and cooperative communication. For example, both are used for "face saving," a communication skill that protects the identity and feelings of those around you to prevent defensiveness. But politeness/negative politeness does this by establishing boundaries and respect between you (e.g., "It wouldn't be polite to ask Eva to drive Grandma home -- we'll just call a cab!" "I know you're busy tomorrow, but would it be possible to squeeze in a 15-minute call?"), while kindness/positive politeness does it by establishing closeness and connection (e.g., including me in an inside joke, so that driving Grandma home feels familial; spotting someone some cash, smirking and saying, "I know you're good for it!").

I would further suggest that positive politeness is a TYPE of kindness, but not all kindness is positive politeness.

Mostly what I found interesting about this is that we often associate politeness with warmth -- but there's nothing necessarily warm about certain kinds of negative politeness, such as the woman who wouldn't ever let her head be above mine. In fact, it had the effect of feeling quite distancing. And since I've been on the road for two months, I've had the chance to witness politeness across several different cultures.

(I'm in Myanmar now, and I've experienced a lot of warmth/kindness/positive politeness here. Many people here begin a conversation by saying, "You are beautiful! and they're not afraid to ask, "Can we take one photo with you?")

I definitely agree with the "why not just call it blue/green" concept. Especially with words that are so super charged as "masculine" and "feminine" (and, let's be real: even the most progressive feminist men might flinch at being called "feminine"), it probably makes more sense to go with a more neutral term. If all of psychology could be boiled down into three main pillars, one would be, "Word choice matters."

I appreciate the comment, even though you semi-disagreed with me. :P It's always good to be challenged and forced to refine my own views. I strongly disagree with the claim that no one has ever changed their minds based on the comments section. I definitely have!

Reply
World Traveler
4/9/2017 04:16:39 pm

That was a lot to follow. But since I just got back from Malaysia, I found it very interesting and helpful. If I had to choose one word to describe the Malaysian people, I would use yours: warm. Everywhere I went, Malaysian people were extremely warm and kind and I can't wait to go back.

Reply
Kevin Bates
4/27/2017 05:47:05 am

The Malaysians did not perceive you as being Jewish apparently, or they'd likely have been rude as hell..also your white skin helped plenty

Reply
Eva Glasrud link
4/30/2017 12:32:18 pm

Fair enough -- I can only speak from my own experience. Did you have a crappy encounter in Malaysia?

Reply



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