The last piece of pie

How do you know that you're too conscientious with your studies or with your work? The answer is that you never get sick except on vacation! I wasn't feeling good during our last lesson before the autumn brake and in the very same evening I got this flu. It isn't fair now, is it? At least there's no need to go downtown this week. (Unfortunately it seems I might miss most of the Cinemaissí because I can't leave the house. Cinemaissí is a really nice film festival where they present Latin Americal films.)

I understood on Friday that my critique on an article "Preference" still needed some evaluation and it's good that we started to write a second version of it during our lesson. I realized that what I wrote last time was not actually a critique but a summary. (I guess I was a little bit too fascinated about the theory since I was reading about it for the first time.) Now I've had time to think more about the preference theory and I've actually got something critical to say about it. I'll present some of the ideas here and after that I'll place the whole critique on Moodle. So here we go:

Maybe the biggest problem of the theory of preference organization is that it makes the world and the interaction between people look too simple. It says that rejections, disconfirmations, disagreements or correcting other person's speech are always, and in all kinds of situations unpreferred. But are these kind of responses always unpreferred? I don't think we can make such a generalization when we are talking about the real world and it's colorful, diverse conversation situations. I'll give some examples. One classic situation that conversation analysists use when describing the contexts where multiple preferences operate is a self-deprecation situation. The context of multiple preferences is a context where different preferences are in conflict with one another. Let's imagine a situation where your friend says that he thinks he is fat. After your friend said this kind of argument all different answer options suddenly start to bounce inside your head. In a normal situation it would be preferred to avoid a disagreement but... Wait a minute here! If you say you agree that your friend is fat he's propably going to get hurt. So in a self-deprecation situation there are at least two different preferences that are in conflict with one another and normally the disagreement answer wins. When I say normally I mean normally but not always. We'll get there later.

Another situation conversation analysists use as an example of a multiple preference situation is the "last piece of pie". Normally it's not appropriate to refuse an offer but this situation makes an example when multiple preferences start to operate. If you say "yes" to a last-piece-of-pie offer you might 1) seem greedy and 2) there's a possibility that the host of the house gets angry. He might have actually wanted to eat that last piece by himself but offers it now to you because it's polite. So normally the guest would just say "no" or "thank you but I'm totally full already" or something similar. And now we are finally getting to my point: I'm quite sure that people not always give a disagreement when there is a self-deprication situation and they don't always refuse to take the last piece of pie.

A good friend of mine was staying with us last week and he actually sayd "okay" right away when the last piece of cake was offered. Thanks to him I realized something very important about preference. The thing that I figured out was this: preference stops working when people are very close to each other! People can be very straightforward with their familiars and with people they trust. Just think about it! How often do close family members can say to each other: "Yes I think you've gained a little more weight" when the other one is complaining about that (a self-deprication situation) or "Yeah, thanks I could have the last piece of pie. I'm still feeling hungry". So the biggest problem of Preference theory is that it ignores warm and friendly relationships in which people sometimes forget all kind of preference rules and say what they really think and how they really feel. I think there's a big whole in the whole theory that should be filled with more knowledge about close relationships. It would be so interesting to study conversations between close family members or lovers for example.

I have to say, after I wrote this I'm so excited! I think I know what I would like to study in my thesis now...

P.S. http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2011/02/14/rsa-animate-language-window-human-nature/
This was funny! I think I'll try to find more presentations about language!