And here is the conclusion of Miss Conduct’s Mind over Manners. I hope I haven’t spoiled the twist at the end for you.

The conclusion covers a lot of material, but the heart of it is summed up in this blog post from almost exactly a year ago. The post was prompted by this question from a reader:

Is etiquette relevant? It seems whether one is boarding the T or working in business that our society has devolved to a “me first,” “I’ve got mine,” pushing and shoving match. Yes, I know etiquette is alive and well at the Four Seasons and among the Brahmin, but it seems a bit of civilization that we lost in our efforts to make everything common.

Go read the post to see my response–or better yet, buy the book.

And, this is the money chapter as put through Wordle. This is the chapter that got me on “The Today Show,” so it will always have a special place in my heart. And my press kit.

Here is an excerpt from the money chapter that was published in the Globe Sunday magazine.

UPDATE: This post will float at the top until Monday. New content is below.

Hey everyone!

It’s time for the Second Annual Clerihew Contest! Last year‘s was just so much fun I decided to make it an annual event. This year’s winner will receive a signed copy of Miss Conduct’s Mind over Manners.

July 10 is Clerihew Day, celebrating the poetic invention of Edmund Clerihew Bentley. These are the rules for a Clerihew poem:

1. They are about a person, and the first line is (usually) the name of that person.
2. There are four lines.
3. The rhyme scheme is AABB; the first two lines and the second two lines rhyme.
4. There is no meter; that is, the lines can be as long or short as you want.

Here is the winning entry from last year:

Tim Berners-Lee
Invented HTTP
Thus the World Wide Web was born
For Nigerian Diplomats and porn.

And the four runners-up:

Bill Gates
Has left the giant software company everyone hates.
“Hey, Mistah?
Are *you* gonna use Vista?”

William S. Burroughs
Had a brow filled with wrinkles and furrows
(Which were probably exacerbated, of course,
By his addiction to horse).

Thomas Edison
Invented a type of electricity that we have mostly had to jettison.
The clear advantages of direct over alternating current
Weren’t.

Edmund C. Bentley
Wrote intently,
But would now be anonymous
Were it not for the verse form for which his middle name is eponymous.

Get the idea?

The rules of the Second Annual Miss Conduct Clerihew contest:

1. Leave your clerihews in comments (on this blog or the other one, it doesn’t matter).
2. Follow the proper clerihew form.
3. No clerihews about me, Mr. Improbable, or Milo (if you want to post or e-mail me some, we’d be delighted, but clerihews about the judge, her spouse, or beloved dog can’t be considered for the contest for reasons of objectivity).
4. Clerihews containing sexual or political material will be disallowed.
5. You can enter as many clerihews as you like.
6. Clerihews will be judged on wit, accuracy, psychological perspecuity, and linguistic ingenuity.

Entries will be accepted until midnight on Sunday. On Monday, July 6, I will post the top 5 clerihews. Then you can vote on the winners, right here on this blog. Voting will be open until noon on Friday, July 10–CLERIHEW DAY!–at which point the winner will be posted, and may begin a wild weekend of celebration.

This was apparently a one-time, never-to-be-repeated glitch. A few weeks ago, a friend e-mailed me:

I meant to send you this before. When I ordered your book on Amazon, this book came up under the “People who bought this book also bought…” It pleased me, though I’m not quite sure why.

A Taste for Red (Hardcover)
by Lewis Harris (Author)

Editorial Reviews
Review
“I loved it! Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Nancy Drew. Svetlana is a fresh, strong, and witty voice and I hope we will hear more about her adventures as she accepts and hones her newfound talent and abilities.” (Diana Capriola, Little shop of Stories, Decatur, Georgia )

Product Description
A sixth-grade Goth girl who thinks she’s a vampire encounters her greatest nemesis when she enrolls at Sunny Hill Middle School in this hilarious and entirely original take on the vampire genre for middle graders.

Svetlana Grimm has recently discovered she’s a vampire. The clues are all there: she can eat only red foods, has to sleep under the bed because of her heightened sensitivity to light and noise, and can read others’ thoughts. But this new discovery is making her transition from home-schooling to attending sixth grade at Sunny Hill Middle School that much more difficult. After all, what can she possibly have in common with those jellybean-eaters in her class? She prefers to watch them from afar in her hidden lair atop the Oak of Doom in her backyard.

But things get more interesting when Svetlana’s cruel yet beautiful science teacher, Ms. Larch, reads her thoughts. Svetlana is excited to have found another of her kind—until her new neighbor, The Bone Lady, fills her in on Ms. Larch’s true identity and her own. What happens when your sixth-grade science teacher might also be your immortal enemy?

Sounds like Svetlana is dealing with plenty of diversity. She could use Miss Conduct’s words of wisdom.

The phrase “the wisdom of the markets” sounds like a dark joke these days, but judgments by groups of people are usually more accurate than judgments by a single person. (That is, as long as the group result is the average of a bunch of individual results. The ability of groups to make reasoned decisions together is notoriously bad, as this poster brilliantly illustrates.) The British Psychological Society blog describes a new experiment showing that people can get this effect within their very own, single, solitary mind:

You can boost your quiz performance by unleashing the crowd within, a new study shows. The next time your’re asked to estimate a historical date, for example, try doing the following: make your first estimate; then pause and assume your first guess was off the mark. Consider why, then use this new perspective to make a second estimate. Average your two estimates and, chances are, this newly calculated date will be more accurate than your original answer. The new approach is called “dialectical boot-strapping” and according to Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig, it really works.

…

“Part of the wisdom of the many resides in an individual mind,” the researchers said. “Dialectical bootstrapping is a simple mental tool that fosters accuracy by leveraging people’s capacity to construct conflicting realities.”

I bolded that last clause because this is really at the crux of things. In my Harvard Business School job, I recently reviewed a huge amount of literature on cognitive biases, or the typical ways people tend to make mistakes. There’s a ton of these biases: we overestimate the role we ourselves played in events, for good or ill; we throw good money after bad; we leap to conclusions about other people without taking their circumstances into account; we cannot predict our own emotions accurately. Really, spend enough time reading about all of the ways in which people are predictably irrational and you won’t even want to get out of bed, your chances of making a good decision are so low.

And you can’t really “debias” people like you’d debug a computer program. It’s not a quantitative thing. You can’t simply tell a person, “People typically overestimate how many calories they burn by 20%, so the next time you go to the gym, multiply the number of calories you think you burned by 0.8″ and have that make any difference. The only thing that seems to help people make better decisions is for them to aggressively and imaginatively think through alternate scenarios–in short, to envision how their present construction of events could be wrong. Or could go wrong–even if you are understanding a situation correctly, circumstances can change. If you are thinking to wait out the recession in grad school, say, it would be worthwhile to ask yourself: What if the economy dramatically turned around? Would this still be the right decision?

“What if?” and “How do I know?” — get in the habit of asking yourself these questions. They only make you feel dumb at first.

Kids are resilient, and parents are people. Those are the two fundamental premises of the “Mother, May I? Children” chapter of Miss Conduct’s Mind over Manners. I’ve heard from a number of moms that they liked this chapter a lot, which really pleases me. On all the other topics–food, money, religion, relationships, health, pets–I’ve got some personal skin in the game. This was the one chapter for which that isn’t the case. So thank you, all you parents and readers, for schooling me!

I sympathize with the Hare Krishna letter writer’s frustration. Clearly, he feels coming out is not an option, and it probably isn’t. I’m sure he knows more about prejudice against his religion than I do.

What he’s asking for, though–for people not only to let him do as he likes, but to cease wondering about his behavior–isn’t going to happen. Other people are the most important and interesting aspect of our environment. Determining why other people do what they do–developing attributions for their actions, hypotheses about their intentions–is a huge part of what human cognition is. Asking people to stop speculating on the motives and thoughts of others is futile.

We are particularly driven to explain behavior that is nonconforming. No one feels the need to uncover the real reason that Jim likes to wear Dockers on casual Friday, but if Jim preferred a leather kilt, most people, if not the letter writer, would devote a bit of brain space to wondering why.

If your first interpretation was “Jim must be wearing the kilt to make fun of management and casual Friday,” you’re probably not alone. We are driven to explain the behavior of others–and often, if we are in doubt, we will make the most negative interpretation. Psychologists Martie Haselton and David Nettle describe humans as “paranoid optimists” who make mistakes in predictable directions based on the possible consequences. Back in the evolutionary day, if someone was acting strangely, you could either assume that they were harmless or that they were up to no good. If you assumed that they were harmless when they weren’t, you might get killed. If you assumed they were up to no good when they were harmless, you had an awkward moment. Given life in the Pleistocene, the occasional awkward moment wasn’t so bad, and even broke up the monotony some. It certainly beat getting killed, so it was generally thought of as best to distrust someone who acting different.

We’re not wholly trapped by our evolutionary history. We can probably get somewhat better, overall, at not leaping to negative conclusions. And some individuals will be very good at giving others the benefit of the doubt. (It seems that the letter writer has learned from his own unhappy experience and doesn’t make automatic negative attributions about others. Good for him–truly. Being discriminated against can lead to paranoia as easily as empathy.)

The letter writer didn’t ask me for advice, but if he had, I would have said something like this: If people have a fundamental need to explain nonconforming behavior, the best way to manage them is to give them an explanation. Is there some other logical and true story you can tell to make sense of your actions? Most of what we do we do for more than one reason, after all. If you really enjoyed drinking, for example, your on-again-off-again practice of your religion would probably not keep you from it, at least occasionally. Why else don’t you drink?

Some people will comment that you have every right to say “Mind your own business” and leave it at that. They’re right, you do have every right to say that. And after a while, the people who know you well will stop wondering about your (quite minor) eccentricities, because they will have grown used to them. But you’ll always have to deal with new people, and new people will always try to figure you out. Which gives you four choices: come out about your religion, move to a place where biking, teetotalling, vegetarianism and working on Christmas don’t attract particular notice (you wouldn’t be considered odd in my neighborhood), give people a story to latch on to, or put up with being misunderstood.

Here is a fascinating letter I got shortly before Mind over Manners was published, from an advance reader who called himself a “case study” for the book:

I have spent the last 30 years as a practicing/lapsed/practicing/lapsed Hare Krishna, and while I haven’t told more than 6-7 people that, in the 13 years I have lived in [State], I have found that many people take great offense at the restrictions and prohibitions that I am obligated to disclose in the workplace, volunteering, etc.

None of them have any idea of why I attempt to maintain the restrictions, but that doesn’t stop them from wildly speculating:

“He rides a bicycle instead of driving a car because he lost his license” (not because it is healthy)
“It must because he is an alcoholic, did you know he refuses to go to company get-togethers if alcohol is served”
“I think my neighbor is a racist who doesn’t like black people; why else won’t he come over for barbeque and beer and sports talk?”
“And he doesn’t mind working on Christian holidays….how are we ever going to discourage our company from working on holidays if HE does?” And on and on and on………

I am beginning to think that wearing my chosen religion on my sleeve, on the bookshelf in my cubicle, on the teeshirt under my work clothes may have been the correct choice, because as it stands, I have left a wake of people that are completely convinced I don’t like them for the color of their skin, because they are the boss, because of…….. Anything but the simple and correct understanding which is that everyone is allowed to decide what they eat, what they drink, who they associate with, and until a behavior rises to the level of insult, hostility, violence, etc., the practitioner owes no one an apology or an explanation.

I recently answered a Craigslist ad, when I arrived at the person’s house; he was doing yard work in a leather kilt. I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell. That behavior was easy for me, because of all my memories of being rudely interrogated for behaviors that aren’t illegal, didn’t put anyone at risk, and weren’t anyone’s business.

My response to come shortly. Keeping comments closed for now but I’ll open them up after I’ve posted my thoughts.

I’m on Twitter (robinabrahams, if you want to follow me), and have been since early May, before the book came out. I’m still not entirely sure how to best use Twitter, but I’m in there, gamely tweeting away. Here is my short happy life in Tweets:

And so on …

Here’s “She Said, He Said: Sex & Relationships” chapter from my book, Wordle’d into art. Note the semi-prominent “Coolfriend” (above “Women”) and “Mensch” (between “People” and “Men”). Mr. Mensch, you see, used the best asking-out line ever on Ms. Coolfriend. You’ll have to read the book to find out what it was, and why exactly it is so good.

Apparently I’m not the only one. Many of you are also driven crazy by comments or questions that you know are wholly innocent and socially appropriate. And I dare say that any of us who have occasionally been in one of those “Just don’t ASK me how [my job hunt, the dissertation, trying to have a baby, selling that house we've had on the market since mid-2008, recovering from my hip surgery] is going!” moods sometimes feel a twinge of discomfort when we encounter friends or acquaintances who are in similarly delicate situations. Ought we ask? Are they tired of talking about it? Ought we not ask? And risk them thinking we are tired of listening? Oy. One wants to be sensitive … yet it is so difficult! With apologies to Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being asked personal questions is not being asked personal questions.

The fear of saying something hurtful-if-not-rude reminded me of this post from my Miss Conduct blog, on the pros and cons of friending one’s parents on Facebook. Many commenters rightly pointed out that nothing on Facebook is really private anyway, with one stating, “[M]y worst enemy will never see anything other than banal posts like ‘I took my dog for a walk’ or ‘I’m grilling hamburgers with the family.’” So that’s the reason so many Facebook posts are notoriously boring! Rather than risk giving offense, or giving ammunition to someone who may wish you ill, people cling to dull, anodyne status updates that no one can possibly object to.

And here’s where I’m going with all this. It’s terribly trendy these days to run around accusing the rest of the world of narcissism (I’ve written about this before). I wonder, though: if people are focusing more on themselves, and talking more about themselves, might there be at least some degree of pro-social motivation to this? “Why do you think the rest of the world cares what you have for breakfast?” the anti-narcissism crusader against Facebook thunders. Maybe the person who posted, “Greek yogurt and honey is yummy!” isn’t necessarily convinced that hundred of friends are breathlessly eager for this news. Maybe she simply wants to express herself, a sort of virtual wave hello, but doesn’t want to risk starting a debate about abortion, or having her mother nag her to explain the origin of some private joke, or her employer see that she was out until 3am last night. In short, perhaps all those “Time for bed!” and “Coffee, STAT!” updates are less the result of compulsive self-expression than they are of compulsive self-censorship.

In face-to-face conversation, too, I wonder if we sometimes come across as self-absorbed because we fear asking, or saying, the wrong thing. We hesitate to ask the graduate about his job plans, the mom-to-be about her pregnancy, the groom about his honeymoon, the academic about her grant application. And haven’t we all been taught that when fighting with loved ones, we are to use “I” statements (“I feel hurt when you do X”) rather than “you” statements (“You always do X, you big moron”)? Awareness of diversity, too–of the different ways that men and women, whites and people of color, straights and gays experience the world–can leave the sensitive soul feeling that she can only speak with real authority when she is speaking about herself. (Compare this to some fifty years ago or so, when men and white people felt quite capable of speaking for humanity as a whole.) Certainly, this sensitive soul feels that way. I use a huge number of first-person pronouns in my work–a measure sometimes used as a dependent variable to determine a writer’s level of narcissism! But it doesn’t stem from that at all. I mean, of course I’m in love with my own words, that’s why I’m a writer. But my compulsion to keep qualifying them as my words comes less from hubris than humility. This is my opinion of what your mother-in-law said at the last family picnic. Not God’s. Not Jane Austen’s. Not Oprah’s. Just mine, influenced by my own unique experiences and education. Don’t take it for more than that.

Some people are still self-absorbed jerks, I’m not saying they aren’t. But I wonder if there aren’t other motives at play as well. What do you think?

I wish my own father of blessed memory were here to help me write columns tonight. I can just imagine his responses to some of the ones I’m working on now:

“Son, everyone has to work with someone like that. I could tell you about this one guy in Chicago … but life’s too short. Do your job and ignore him.”

“That seems reasonable to me, but I’m not your wife. Take her out to her favorite restaurant and give her a nice bottle of perfume and ask her.”

“Oh, sure, you’re within your RIGHTS to do that. But no one will ever invite you back for a drink after the game, and if there’s ever a disputed call, they won’t resolve it in your favor.”

“Lady, he’s just a little kid. In six months he won’t even remember this.”

“This you consider a problem at work? This is no problem. This is just work.”

“If everyone knows perfectly well that you’re lying, it isn’t lying anymore. Then it’s just being polite.”

Share advice from (or in the style of) YOUR dad in comments!

Today’s column addresses the awkwardness of repeated hallway meetings in the workplace:

During my workday I make multiple trips between my office and other rooms in the building. I often pass the same people in the hallways several times. After the first direct greeting each day, I feel awkward if I do not say something to acknowledge them as we pass. I sometimes have something business-related to mention, occasionally something witty, but always a nod and smile. Is the last response acceptable, as multiple “hellos” each day seems weird?

I tweeted earlier today that this question is “very Simon/Sacha Baron Cohen.” The Baron Cohen cousins are among the world’s most renowned scholars and practitioners, respectively, of the awkward moment. Mr. Improbable explains it all for you.

… the one-eyed man is “Kings.”

In other words, the show’s not perfect, but it’s a remarkable effort for network TV. Let’s talk about what works and doesn’t work in “Kings.”

What works, surprisingly enough, is the show’s theology, which is probably the main reason that it got cancelled. We like our religion in this country, but nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to deal with the God of the Hebrew Bible. The moody, sacrifice-loving God of “Kings” acts in on human events, but obliquely, conveying his wishes through double-yolked eggs, extinguished candles, and the like. He seems to have very particular notions about border control, and few thoughts at all for the soldiers and civilians who die defending those borders. He is a God far more concerned with building a nation than with constructing a moral code. He is infinitely involved in the minutia of the lives of the elite–the king and his family, the priests, the arms merchants–and utterly indifferent the vast population of “Gilboa,” who, presumably, worship and offer sacrifices just as their leaders do.

“Touched by an Angel” it’s not. There’s a reason that nobody, with the possible exception of a few fringe elements in the Israeli settlements, worships this idea of God anymore.* This is the God of national honor and glory, not universal peace and justice. So kudos to “Kings” for actually trying to grapple with a vision of God that is deeply disturbing and unappealing to modern sentiments–and that’s right there in your Bible in black and white. It’s a bold choice. “Kings” does a much better job than “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica” ever did of setting out the rules of engagement with the supernatural from the beginning. You know starting off that God is real, that he has a plan, and that he communicates with certain people but that it is possible to misinterpret his wishes. Both “Lost” and, most egregiously, “Battlestar Galactica,” tend to pull in the supernatural elements whenever they can’t explain a plot point logically, a narrative gap-mending role less appropriate to God than to grout.

Perhaps the producers are still relying too much on the show’s Biblical conceit, however, because the alternative-universe elements of the show are a great disappointment. God dropping hints to his favored ruler like so many mints on a hotel-room pillow? Fine, I can believe that. An absolute monarchy in a nation with a free press? Now that strains my credulity. Although “Kings” works well as a family drama, the show fails to flesh out the kind of nation that Gilboa is. How much power does King Silas really hold? Do all Gilboans believe in God, and do they all agree on what God wants from them? Why was Gilboa at war with Gath? What does God think about Gath? Is he their God too? Why was the king’s son allowed into direct combat? (I seem to recall this being a controversy overseas when Prince Harry signed on for Afghanistan.) What was the form of government in Gilboa before the monarchy? How did Shiloh become so technologically advanced? Was Queen Rose being literal when she said that Silas took Gilboa from virtual hunter-gatherer existence to the 21st century? How the hell did that happen if so, and why aren’t more people walking around looking like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer?

It’s good theology. It’s really, really bad science fiction. It’s bad television writing overall, really. One of the themes of modern high-quality television is going beyond the character or small social group to look at the larger world in which the dramas play out. “Deadwood” and “The Wire” are more about the founding of civilization and the nature of institutions, respectively, than they are about any given character. “The Sopranos” invites viewers to compare and contrast the ethics and etiquette of the Mafia with that of affluent middle-class America. “Battlestar Galactica” painted a nuanced picture of a society in which women’s rights were a given but social class left scars so deep they almost functioned as caste markers. “Kings” only focuses on … the king, and his God, and his family, and his rival. It would have been a better show if they had named it “The Kingdom.”

*Modern Jews do not worship the God of the Hebrew Bible (aka the “Old Testament.”) A common misconception among non-Jews is the idea that Judaism kind of stopped after Christianity began. This is like thinking that English history ended in 1776, because we have America now. Judaism continued to evolve, write a whole ‘nother holy book, and developed a concept of God that goes well beyond the violent tribalism of the first five books of the Bible.

Yahoo’s featured news roundup is often odd, but this morning’s was especially good:

Read the whole thing. It’s like a conversation with a stoned college student:

“Dude, did you know pirates had health insurance! Seriously! Like, arr, dude, me leg’s been deducted into Davy Jones’ locker! Like, pirates back then totally evolved into modern pirates … and they’re still evolving. Like birds, dude! Birds are totally dinosaurs, did you know that? So, like, since dinosaurs are extinct, I guess that means the whole ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch is true, ’cause parrots are dinosaurs and dinosaurs are ex-parrots! Or, like, pre-parrots, but whatever dude. Joined the choir invisible! Pinin’ for the fjords! …

“Hey, speaking of parrots, dude, my professor was telling us about this chick who’s got a parrot that can count and shit. Like, it’s as smart as a five-year-old kid, can you imagine? She’s been training it for, like, longer than we’ve been alive. Using all that stuff from my into psych class with like Skinner conditioning and all. I think my girlfriend does that shit to me sometimes, I swear. You ever stop to think that maybe life is just a big psychology experiment? I mean, how would you even know?

“Especially, like, if you were in the control group.”