The experiences of social conventions vary immensely across the globe. From Andrei Mamor: Social Conventions, conventional rules have an arbitrary nature. This means that we should be able to determine an alternative rule to achieve the same purpose, and if the conventional rules are not followed within the community they lose their specific purpose. But why do people follow conventional rules? It is tied to the fact that others follow it too, and therefore it becomes a recognisable expression that indicates a specific purpose. For example, in Australia consider the convention of saying “hello” when we answer the phone, the same response reflects the manifest feature as an expression that enables the caller to recognise that someone has answered.
What I didn’t realise, is just how different these are translated across cultures, this was seen in my first YouTube encounter in ‘Japan: Can You Not?’ where I…
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