Why do I sometimes "play dumb"?

[Misty Avich]

I don't really feel bad if it was only a white lie and nobody was hurt. When I was a child, like all small children, I'd worry about being found out of a white lie instead of understanding that the truth from some white lies is so insufficient to adults lives that they likely aren't going to notice or care.
But being only 4 or 5 years old I thought "what if the teacher goes to my house and checks what my front door looks like?" But in reality, the teacher wouldn't do that or even care what my front door looked like, because the idea of the exercise wasn't "draw your house truthfully down to every exact detail otherwise you'll be in big trouble". Lol
I also remember when I was 7 we had to make up a story about finding magic slippers. But when I took my work home at the end of the school year, I worried my mum would tell me off for lying because there's no such thing as magic slippers that take you into a wonderland when you wear them. So I told her that it was a dream I had lol. But in reality, she wouldn't be mad. Parents know that your work you produce is just what your teacher has told you to do and that it doesn't really count as lying lol.

 

[AuAL]

LOL - I could have done that too, if I'm caught in doing something unintentionally wrong, the feeling of failure is worse than the one of maybe twisting the truth a bit...

I always feel bad for a loooooooong time after, ok I admit, it was me who scratched that table in the office, sorry

How many years after?

 

[kriss72]

How many years after?

Unless you are my old boss, then the table thing was maybe 5-6 years ago, it was an accident... I remember other things back to my childhood.

 

[Misty Avich]

"Feigning ignorance"
That's a better term to use, as someone could get offended by the term "playing dumb". But it isn't implying that people who generally miss social cues are dumb, it's just a non-literal expression people use.

 

[Levitat0r]

Why do I keep playing dumb? It's like it's a habit I can't seem to break.

A guy had just come back from suspension (I won't go into the reasons why), and he has a late Christmas present for me and says he'll give it to me when I finish my shift (he finishes at a different time, so we don't have breaks together). Yesterday before I left to go home I went to find him, but another colleague told me not to find him because he's working. I knew the reason why he said that, it was because he'd just returned from his suspension and wasn't a good idea to distract him while he was working (chattering among colleagues during work time isn't really against any rules here, as everyone else does it).

But despite automatically knowing the reasons, I still expressed to another colleague that it wasn't fair I wasn't allowed to speak to my friend and that they shouldn't stop me. I pretended to be looking at it from a "he won't let me talk to my friend because he's a jerk" perspective, and I was hoping the colleague I was confiding in would agree. But instead she said what I already knew, about him not being allowed to chat during work time because of his suspension. So I then felt a bit silly.


Is this a normal human behaviour, or is it just me being awkward to myself? I do find myself doing this quite a lot, I act more naive than I really am, meaning I know and understand more social situations than I let on. Why is this? Does anyone else do this?

You might just be approaching the thing from different perspectives, and then getting mixed up. In some general sense, it's kind of lame you can't talk to anyone you want, but it's hard to comment not knowing the environment. There are lots of times where I've approached something more than one way simply because I wasn't sure what was true, so you're kind of poking the issue from different approaches to see which one makes more sense.