Hacker News Reader

Comment by drabbiticus | Hacker News Reader

This seems likely to be cultural, possibly even microcultural.

I know many adults who believe that splitting bills is a normal and reasonable thing to do.

Splitting bills, where each pay a part in the restaurant, fine. Splitting bills where one pays and the other sends him money, not.

Who is making these rules up? Why do you think they apply universally?

God made them, as far as I know. Humanity lived in gift economies long before the invention of barter and trade.

These are etiquette rules, which have their benefits. Since nobody is forced to follow etiquette, they help you to learn things about people.

Generosity is one of the easiest life hacks to find out who is friendly towards you and who is not. If you buy them a drink and they won't buy you a drink back, that's a tiny cost for you to know what kind of fellow you're dealing with. If they buy you a drink and then asks you to transfer money to them, you also learn something about them. If people splitting bills want to sit and count to make sure that everybody pays exactly for what they had, then you learn something. And so on.

If you invite people for dinner a few times, you will learn something about that person whether you wanted to or not.

The presence of social constructs is advantageous to group survival, and an individual operating within a given set of such constructs may choose to adhere to or reject the norms of those constructs. As you say, you do learn things about people through interacting with them. I think ideally this interaction includes discovering what their norms are, whether they believe they are conforming/rejecting/otherwise to a status quo, and the reason for it. The action itself is may not be sufficient to infer an individual's values without the context and reasoning, especially in the absence of clear communication. Social constructs are local to social groups and subgroups, with differing levels of conservation and generalization between groups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com