manners

[HR-Student]

i know its a bit lax for me to ask this now especialy on a monday morning but why do we have manners?

[mother]

Manners simply refer to a person's pre-programmed behaviour and responses. There are good ones and there are bad ones. And you have them because you were conditioned that way, by repitition.

[adrianh]

An interesting thing is that most primates have a built in (hard wired or instinctive) sense of fairness. Primates get upset when another hogs all the food and it has been shown that primates will defend what they consider to be fair, even at their own disadvantage.

I think that manners are a group specific (be it cultural, racial, club) set of rules for human interaction based on social standards of fairness and respect. One shouldn't grab all the cake at a party (why not), in some cultures a man walks ahead of a women, in others the man walks behind, in some its rude to look a superior in the eye, in others its rude not to. The idea of "rude" is a social standard.

I think that some issues do create place for disagreement and that "manners" help to neutralize the disagreement. What happens when two people get to a lift at exactly the same time (ok, is ZA it would be neither because a thrird person with 7 children would push in ahead of everybody else), or if there is one piece of cake left between 5 people and they have all had an equal share.

What we consider to be manners also cause a great deal of conflict between different cultures. Men walk ahead of women or vice versa, some eat with a spoon, some with their hands (some with only a particular hand) and some with three different sets of cutlery. Some find it terribly rude to change from beer to wine --and back to beer-- at supper (I kid you not)