Interestingly the social logic of thanking for work is one of the ones that's actually totally transparent for me, and always has been? Which given how much of social logic is not is interesting to me especially given how it apparently is not for others!
But I also knew it explicitly as being about feelings and about, in its own way, a different set of outcomes: the reasons for saying "thank you" were explained to me, as a child, as "when someone does something for you, saying 'thank you' makes them feel good, and not saying 'thank you' makes them feel bad", and Making People Feel Bad was the worst thing in the world . . . and also (and this part was also explicitly laid out for me, even though my parents presumed I was NT at the time), when you make people feel bad, they don't want to do things for you anymore.
As this held up MARVELLOUSLY to repeated field-tests (although I never did get the hang of thank-you notes and still kind of hate them because they're so disconnected from the thing I am thanking for argh), it became a Know Mechanism of the world.
no subject
But I also knew it explicitly as being about feelings and about, in its own way, a different set of outcomes: the reasons for saying "thank you" were explained to me, as a child, as "when someone does something for you, saying 'thank you' makes them feel good, and not saying 'thank you' makes them feel bad", and Making People Feel Bad was the worst thing in the world . . . and also (and this part was also explicitly laid out for me, even though my parents presumed I was NT at the time), when you make people feel bad, they don't want to do things for you anymore.
As this held up MARVELLOUSLY to repeated field-tests (although I never did get the hang of thank-you notes and still kind of hate them because they're so disconnected from the thing I am thanking for argh), it became a Know Mechanism of the world.