Rapid reading of a group's unspoken state, treated as a trainable skill with a name rather than an inborn trait.
Literally eye-measure: the capacity to judge, on entering, what a room already thinks and what may now be said. What is distinctive is not the ability, which is presumably universal, but that the language names it, evaluates people on it, and treats it as improvable.
In practice
- A new manager who says nothing in her first three meetings knows by the fourth which two people actually decide.
- A visitor who makes the reasonable proposal at the wrong moment finds it rejected and then adopted a month later from another mouth.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is training: a culture that names and teaches the skill produces more attention to it. Another is that hierarchical and indirect communication makes reading the room necessary rather than optional.
- In its favour
- Naming a skill makes it teachable, and the ability it names, judging a group's unspoken state, is measurable as social sensitivity.
- Against it
- Whether it picks out anything distinct from measured social sensitivity has not been established, and claims that it is culturally unique rest on description rather than comparison.
- Standing
- Named and taught as a skill in Korean usage. Whether it picks out an ability distinct from measured social sensitivity has not been established.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop