To think that "common sense" isn't as common as people believe?

[SorcererGaheris]

This is inspired by the thread about the restaurant offered a free (birthday) meal as long as five people were dining - which turned out only applied to five ADULTS, but according to the OP it wasn't specified that it only applied to adults.

Many people are saying that it's "common sense" that such an offer would apply only to adults and some are questioning the intelligence of anyone who wouldn't realise that.

I commented that it would not have occurred to me that such an offer only applied to adults dining and a couple of people have been a little critical of me for that. Because apparently it's "common sense."

Well, maybe I lack common sense. My mother has often told me that I have none.

So my point is - surely so-called "common sense" isn't actually as common as many people believe it is?

People's minds work differently, people understand things differently. People who are neurodiverse sometimes take wording very, very literally and can sometimes need things spelled out to them that would seem obvious to others (I am autistic myself.)

I do find it unfair when people insult/mock or imply that someone is lacking in intelligence for not having "common sense". That doesn't make them stupid, it just means that their minds aren't connecting the dots in the same way that other people do.

I'm not sure that "common sense" should be as much of an expectation as it seems to be.

Thats the example of what I meant when I said people dont think and in particular dont think things through to their natural conclusion

People complaining that common sense isnt obvious or widespread or common, are usually the ones that just see something surface and dont think about how that would work, who's involved, what the implications or outcomes would be.

Common sense isn’t about practical skills. It’s simple stuff

like you move the sugar bowl to the table before adding to your coffee rather than scoop a spoonful of sugar and carry that over to the coffee

or you rinse the vomit lumps off the bed sheets before you put the sheets in the wash (yes DH I’m looking at you)

or you stop pouring the can of drink into the glass when it’s getting close to the top and you don’t keep going until the can is empty and the liquid is about to breach

I think people have become incredibly lazy, have lost the ability to think for themselves, have an excuse for not being able to do anything for themselves. How many use SM to ask stupidly obvious questions instead of taking a few seconds to research - laziness.
how many threads on here where it’s obvious what you should do, or people seeking approval for basic common sense issues ?
People have lost the ability to apply their own mind and therefore lost ability to apply common sense

To have this as part of your "common sense", you'd have to have some idea of how a restaurant makes money. Why they wouldn't actually give anything away "for free". This isn't knowledge that everyone shares equally.

For instance, my children probably have some idea of a business needing to make profit because their parents run their own businesses. Many of the people they know run their own businesses. Things like profit and loss and margins and inflation are part of what they have overheard since they were in the uterus.

So while they may ask why a kids meal doesn't count, once you explained it to them, they have enough related knowledge to immediately get it. Not all of their peers possess this knowledge. They know other things. There is a lot my children wouldn't understand because they don't have the lived experience to contextualise it. These things arent common sense to them..

Also on that thread - shouldn’t the blindingly obvious £5 for a kids meal give you any idea that it’s not a proper full meal price and therefore possible it won’t count.

As I said people have just become so lazy to think and apply themselves because there’s always the ‘out’ - to proceed to complain.

It’s the reason we have contents may be hot printed on coffee cups 😂😂

Common sense relies on a person’s upbringing / background and their experience of the world around them.

But look at the poll results, the overwhelming majority do agree on that, hence " common" sense.

Oh dear @Bruisername. I do hope that it was your DH’s clothing in the machine with the vomity sheet and not your best dress.

I would have assumed that a 2yo eating from a child's menu wasn't counted in the number of diners. Especially as the offer applied to diners eating from the AYCE option on the menu.

These offers always mean full paying adult diners. Always and without exception.

It's like the one diner eats free offers where it's always specified that it's the cheapest meal. Obvious.

Or the children eat free but when people are surprised it's limited to one child/two children per adult (and that an adult actually has to be present) and not unlimited.

They're businesses providing incentives not charities providing for the needy.

Reasoning and prediction are so important.

The ability to think and identify possible outcomes are crucial life skills.

Intelligence and common sense are not the same thing, some of the most intelligent people I've known have no common sense. Common sense is more the ability to see the reasons for something and the consequences of an action

Besides the kids and adults menus I'd also have thought that you'd check the terms of that sort of offer before ordering.

'Common sense' would be to check the applicability of the offer/voucher before the meal, rather than after, by mentioning it whilst ordering. The vast majority of people do this with vouchers etc, especially ones that require ID, like the Birthday offer did.

That restaurant OP was a chancer - chancers NEVER check a voucher or offer beforehand, because they know they probably won't qualify, but are going to try it on anyway. They hope to make a staff member uncomfortable enough to go along with their freebie snatch.

It’s never nice to make fun of someone for lacking ‘common sense’. It’s never nice to make fun of anyone, full stop.

In the example mentioned, the restaurant’s wording was unclear. But I would not have assumed that a child counted as one of the ‘party of 5’, because restaurants are money-making businesses and will have based their business model on 5 people drinking alcohol and/or getting the fancier menu items than usual at a birthday celebration, and that would cover the cost of the 5th plate.

If kids counted, you could theoretically take 4 toddlers with you who ate £5 meals from the kids menu and drank water and you’d get your dinner for free, and the restaurant would be out of pocket and have a god awful mess to clean up afterwards.

I wouldn’t have consciously thought all of that through in my mind, it would just sort of be there as an understanding based on having lived in the world a while and formed a mental model of how things generally work.

So I would have checked with the restaurant first.

I also don’t believe we can really change the entire world to suit the way everyone’s individual minds work - because outside of the average range there is just so much extreme variation. As everyone likes to say, if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.

And once you’re outside of that bell curve, very clear language helps to some extent, but you also need a kind of interpreter who knows the exact, particular things you struggle with.

As someone in a very neurodiverse family, it is way more than a full time job for me to do all the everyday thinking and connecting the dots and spelling things out for loved ones who struggle to understand a ton of little daily things, make inferences, understand how one bit of information relates to another, think of how to phrase a question, take basic care of themselves, or bring to mind what they ought to do in a particular circumstance.

Have a headache? ‘Common sense’ would suggest drinking some water, checking you’ve taken any regular medications, maybe taking an over the counter pain reliever. This is second nature to most people, but my relatives can’t make that connection and just go into a state of helpless panic because it was unexpected, and they don’t know what it means or what to do. These are people with PhDs, so no learning disabilities.

’Common sense’ means average sense, as someone else has pointed out. And I do think that having a very high IQ means your sense is uncommon in all sorts of ways, IYSWIM. As backed up by a lot of the literature about giftedness & twice exceptionality.

But when you are supporting numerous people who, for example, fundamentally reject the entire concept of looking for something because ‘how can I look for it if I don’t know where it is? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard!’ and follow you around debating the semantics of it all for hours while you find all their lost belongings and put them together for the day, you realise just how much human civilisation, collaboration and functioning relies on people being able to make connections and inferences, and find things out that they didn’t already know, and recall stored information that is relevant to the situation at hand.

I think a lot of ‘high functioning’ (esp with high IQ) ND people don’t have any idea how much support they need, and how much is actually being provided to them, all the time, by their loved ones.

And that it’s no simple, easy thing to identify what someone else doesn’t understand, and what exactly it is about it that they’re not understanding, and finding the bits that can be explained differently, and trying several ways to explain them differently, drawing diagrams, breaking it all down into sequential chunks, putting it in writing, making sure they can remember where the written instructions are stored, making sure you’re not asking direct questions / ONLY asking direct yes or no questions / not attempting to speak to them when they’re not expecting to be spoken to, etc.

Not everyone has common sense, and that’s just how the world is, and it means life can be pretty difficult for people who don’t have it and their loved ones - and it’s nobody’s fault, but for the most part nobody’s deliberately designed the world to exclude people who think differently out of sheer meanness.

I am yet to see a "teen menu" in a restaurant, they eat adult meals, complete non-issue

Most child-menus have an age limit on them, to avoid people taking the piss.

That is indeed the problem with ‘common sense’..

@VoltaireMittyDream I agree

but if you are the one with common sense or the one relied on to find things it can be pretty infuriating.

on the looking for things - i have had that with DH - just stands there. So now when he asks if i know where something is (which I normally do because i am an observant person) I say no and leave him to it. Funnily enough he always ends up finding it (although funniest was when he couldn’t find his keys and tore the house apart - dd asked if he’d checked his pocket and would you believe it…).

Now DH isn’t ND - he’s just a knobhead, but with my ND son I am very clear that it is not my responsibility to find his things and that he can ask me nicely to help but I expect him to have a look in his room/pockets/hallway etc and whilst he may not know where it is - neither do I. He is a lot better!

Both DH and DS are high IQ but neither got the common sense gene!

That restaurant OP was a chancer - chancers NEVER check a voucher or offer beforehand, because they know they probably won't qualify, but are going to try it on anyway. They hope to make a staff member uncomfortable enough to go along with their freebie snatch.

My daughter worked at a chain restaurant through 6th form.

This is spot on.

From the perspective of a chancer doing whatever is most likely to make the other person so uncomfortable they do what you want is common sense 😁.

I’m pleased for you that your DH and DC can learn through natural consequences! My ND relatives unfortunately can’t learn this way, because they don’t have the underlying skills.

The consequences when I leave them to try to learn to be independent often affect all of us very negatively.

Things like DH not opening his post & chucking it straight in the bin because ‘nobody sends important things in the post anymore’ but of course he had never signed up for paperless billing and so he didn’t know an account went into unauthorised overdraft and accumulated fines for YEARS and his credit rating (and mine by association) got wrecked.

He and my DM are constantly losing bank cards / car keys / PIN sentries / phones

They never keep track of passwords, and are never able to work out how to log into portals to make medical appts, so they don’t bother and then run out of meds to manage their asthma, hypertension and congestive heart failure, and we end up in A&E

Add to that the constant misunderstandings, not remembering important information, not being able to summarise or pick out salient points or main themes, not being able to speak to a doctor because they go situationally mute, not being able to remember to use a planner or calendar so they miss appointments when they do manage to book them.

Neither have any understanding of how impaired they are. If things are difficult for them it’s because the rest of the world is doing it wrong.

My DC shares these difficulties as well.

It is very very hard, and nobody ever recognises how much work I’m doing to keep the wheels from coming off for all of us.

@VoltaireMittyDream I hear you - and the really frustrating thing is the lack of acknowledgement for you

my dd has adhd and seems incapable of understanding why the world is against her so I do get it

That sounds so frustrating @VoltaireMittyDream , I really feel for you!

Thinking about it, "common sense" really just means "the knowledge you pick up incidentally through life experience" - e.g. you touch the hot pan, you get hurt. Lesson learned. But since people learn in all sorts of different ways, it's a pretty useless generalisation to assume that everyone has, or should have, identical common sense.

What's more, we often ignore it even when we have it. It's common sense to "read the fine print", but how many of us have signed up to some stupid website or other, and ticked the box saying we agree to its (unread 18-page) terms & conditions?

Weirdly this reminds me of Friends when they were having a competition and both thought they’d won because they’d interpreted the rules in a different way- I can’t remember the details though!!!

I think a lot of people who are autistic lack common sense. So as common as that. And then add those who have low intelligence. There’s your group.