Reading the Situation to Act Cooperatively
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To act cooperatively you have to follow the logic of the situation. The logic of the situation is that which best delivers or satisfies what everyone involved is trying to get out of a particular context.
People cooperate (i.e., follow the same logic) as long as they share context/purpose. When a setting has a particular purpose (consider a supermarket), this purpose drives the logic. True, the purpose of a supermarket may be radically different for the shopper, the person holding the cheese samples, the owner, and the person at checkout register. Some people may even have more than one purpose going to the supermarket, like meeting people and buy dinner. But for all those purposes to be satisfied, they have to cooperate to some extent. The conversation becomes one of cooperation between purposes and degrees of cooperation.
You also don't have to follow the logic of the situation. In fact, you can 'tinker with' and extract value from any situation by following a foreign logic. For example, you could perform TikTok dances in a supermarket to generate online engagement at the expense of the original purpose of the place. Social media as it exists today invites people to tinker with every situation, not for their sake but for the sake of an online audience always thirsty for fresh imagery.
✎ Connection to