At one time or other we've all been cornered by a conman. Some friendly stranger on the street strikes up a conversation at the stoplight and next thing you know he's asking for $50 to help an impoverished architect and his family flee from some underdeveloped African nation. You and I both know that there is no real African family in the picture, but it is still hard for us to get away.
How can a stranger engage our time and sympathies so quickly? It all starts with a simple question. According to the 'rules' of conversation that we all follow, when someone asks a question like "Do you have the time?" or "Do you speak English?" and we respond appropriately, we have just committed to a conversation (however brief). At this point, once he's engaged our time and attention, a conman can begin to engage our sympathies.
Similar implicit conversational rules apply to telephone calls, as the simple act of answering the phone commits the receiver to some sort of conversation with the caller. Intriguingly enough, the general conversational 'rule' for telephone conversations is that the caller ends the exchange. If you wish to end your exchange with a telemarketer, you must 'violate' a conversational 'rule' making exchanges with telemarketers are both awkward and entangling.
This information has been extracted from studies of the structure and rules that govern conversation conducted separately by Erving Goffman and Harvey Sacks during the 1980's.
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2 comments:
A guy with a single knife could kill off an entire village of pacifists, I recently read. So you're saying that a single con artist with a telephone could bankrupt a village of people who refuse to break rules of conversational etiquette?
If we're speaking theoretically here, yes, it would be much easier for a conman to bankrupt a village of overly polite people than it would be to kill a village of overly pacifistic folks.
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