One difficulty that I have when place in a new environment, e.g., travelling to a new country or working in a new place, is adapting to day-to-day norms. Travel books are full of advice of the “always insist on taxi drivers using the meter” kind, but I always find it difficult when the reaction of the local is a slightly shocked-bemused look and a comment like “really?”. One problem is that the travel books tend to be quite stiff and risk-averse, for good reason. We don’t want to be taken as a rube or tyro, and so we go along with “what seems normal” in a particular situation, rather than being the stiff outsider who seems to be the first person in a century to insist on rules being followed to the letter.<\/p>\n
I wonder if this sort of thing happens at all levels of engagement with novelty. We sometimes here of a senior politician who is railroaded along into carrying out some corrupt or biased action. The common response to this is to say “come on, you were the Prime Minister, how could you have been so ignorant\/allowed yourself to be taken along for a ride”? But, I don’t think it is as easy as that; I can readily imagine a situation in which you are told “actually, minister, we don’t really<\/em> do things like that” by some adviser or civil servant, and exactly the same kind of psychology as above kicks in. However experienced a politician you might be, being Prime Minister (or whatever) is still new<\/em>, for quite a while, and I can imagine that the pressure not to look like some uptight noob is very influential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One difficulty that I have when place in a new environment, e.g., travelling to a new country or working in a new place, is adapting to day-to-day norms. Travel books are full of advice of the “always insist on taxi drivers using the meter” kind, but I always find it difficult when the reaction of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[5,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1029,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions\/1029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}