Saturday, March 07, 2009

Playing dumb

I'm considering doing business with a place I've never done business with before, and that is either out of my league or just at the very topmost border of my league. So, as with all new interactions with an unknown quantity, I'm writing myself a mental script.

I've been spending some time on their website, so I'm in a position to walk in there knowledgeably and start making declarative statements. "Hi, I'm here to A, B, and C." I have enough information that I could even do it without upspeak. Unless there's an egregious disconnect between website and reality, I'm in a position to show as much confidence as I do when ordering a large double double at Tim Horton's.

However, I found in my mental script I kept landing on less confident-sounding constructions. I'm either hiding my knowledge ("Hi, I was wondering if you had anything like [insert description of thing that will lead me to A, B or C]") or making excuses for it ("Hi, I was looking at your website and...").

But why am I doing this? Why is my social instinct to hide the fact that I've looked at their website, to hide the fact that I have some basic knowledge of what they do and what they offer?

After thinking about this for a while, I'm wondering if maybe my childhood bullies are making me use these less confident constructions. In between time in school and time spent working customer service, the majority of my life was spent in contexts where demonstrating knowledge was discouraged. In school I'd be punished socially for uttering a five-syllable word or for showing prior knowledge of something we were being taught in class, and when working front-line customer service the customers would react poorly if my speech patterns or banter revealed that I was perhaps in their league intellectually. I ended up dropping my register by about 1.5 prestige levels just to get through the day smoothly.

So maybe because of all this, my social instincts are now telling me to walk into situations pretending to be ignorant?

Writing this, I thought of something I read somewhere on the internet once. A parent was writing about how they caught their teenage daughter playing dumb when discussing math homework with a boy, and basically told her it was unacceptable for her to do that. At the time when I read it, it occurred to me that perhaps she wasn't playing dumb specifically so he'd think he was smarter than her (with the assumption that he wouldn't want a girl who's smarter than him) but rather perhaps she was playing dumb as an icebreaker. She asks him for help, he can help her just to be nice and they have an excuse to sit together alone somewhere that's quiet with their heads bent over the same book. Then once he's explained the math, she has an excuse to give him a hug or a minor kiss to express her gratitude, and to do him a favour sometime later. Makes me wish I'd had that in my repetoire as a teenager! (Since I've always wanted prospective lovers to want or at least appreciate my brains, it never occurred to me to play dumb even as an icebreaker.) but now that I actually write about how playing dumb has been helpful socially in various scenarios, I wonder if this poor girl's social repetoire was hindered by her parent's insistence that she never play dumb.

1 comment:

laura k said...

So maybe because of all this, my social instincts are now telling me to walk into situations pretending to be ignorant?

It seems very likely.

Fucking bullies, their work reverberates for so long.

Have you seen the movie "Ben X"?