Being Informative
Practicing the Cooperative Principle is important in our relationships with coworkers, with whom information often needs to be shared in a timely and professional manner. This is especially relevant when communicating via e-mail, where nonverbal cues, such as vocal tone and gestures, are not possible.
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According to Grice (1989), being informative during interpersonal encounters means two things. First, you should present all of the information that is relevant and appropriate to share, given the situation. When a coworker passes you in the hallway and greets you with a quick “How’s it going?” the situation requires that you provide little information in return—“Great! How are you?” The same question asked by a concerned friend during a personal crisis creates very different demands; your friend likely wants a detailed accounting of your thoughts and feelings.
Second, you want to avoid being too informative—that is, disclosing information that isn’t appropriate or important in a particular situation. A detailed description of your personal woes (“I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and my cat is sick . . .”) in response to your colleague’s quick “How’s it going?” query would likely be perceived as inappropriate and even strange.
The responsibility to be informative overlaps with the responsibility to be ethical. To be a cooperative verbal communicator, you must share information with others that has important personal and relational implications for them. To illustrate, if you discover that your friend’s spouse is having an affair, you’re ethically obligated to disclose this information if your friend asks you about it.
Self-Reflection
Recall an encounter where you possessed important information but knew that disclosing it would be personally or relationally problematic. What did you do? How did your decision impact your relationship? Was your choice ethical? Based on your experience, is it always cooperative to disclose important information?