I write from the ‘other’ side of the pond from most (but not all) of my readership: I’m in the United States of America currently. Last week, I did a profile on a distinctive US city, Portland, Oregon. I’m now in Washington State and have had more time to reflect on what I’ve seen. I’ve also had more time to reflect on the interactions I’ve had with people.
I remember from seven years ago, when I was last on this continent, that the people here have a different etiquette to those in the British Isles. I’ve written before about learned behaviours, and how they create a kind of ‘national’ expectation for how to deal with people, especially with strangers.
General American 🇺🇸
There are different layers of ‘national behaviour’. Some of it is an illusion. The “the people are lovely” in X place claim is particularly wrong, as it fails to realise that the people from that place are probably a) being nice to you because you are paying them for goods and services (you are on holiday) and b) that those behaviours might not be intrinsic or deeply meaningful, but a certain learned pattern which is required of them to get along in that particular society.
In United Kingdom, the trope about Americans, particularly those who are selling goods and services (i.e., the Americans people know because they were there on holiday) is that they are ‘over-friendly’. This idea comes hand in hand with the idea that this friendliness is disingenuous: either this is said explicitly “artificially friendly” and some such formulation, or it’s just implicit in the tone of conversation.
This observation from the wan British perspective is partially correct, but fatally mistaken in what it misses out. The correct part is that Americans are friendly. This is true, and I think it is true regardless of whether someone is selling you something or not. In the United Kingdom, if someone wants to get past you, they say the standard formulation “‘scuse me”. Every time. No more; sometimes less. In the United States, in my experience, they actually say a novel sentence, such as “can I just slip past you there” (forgive me if this isn’t perfectly idiomatic American English but you get the idea). When saying hello, it’s similarly varied and lengthy, rather than just a flat “hi how are you”. Ironically, I think Americans are much more verbose and forthright in their politeness, yet it is the British who are reputed for excessive courtesy. Odd.
The friendliness part of the UK trope about US people is just true, in my (admittedly limited) observation. The idea that this is disingenuous friendliness requires a bit more unpacking. It gets to the heart of problems about language, about how the adjectives we use about people and things tend to overlap inexactly with one another. We can be persuaded of one thing by hearing something else, which is slightly different.
To say that American friendliness is disingenuous is wrong, but it overlaps slightly with something which is correct: American friendliness is rehearsed, learned. We tend to assume that things which have been learned or rehearsed are an act: they’re just there for show. Spend a little longer with that person, and the mask will drop, and you’ll get down to some kind of deeper, authentic, unrehearsed personality. This, though, is exactly how learned behaviours in a society do not work. A society which teaches its children to be polite by using certain words or not using certain words never quite lets go of these conventions. These conventions are not an ‘act’: we treat them as if they are real. It is only when we are confronted by other cultures that it dawns on us that they are not universal and not ‘real’ in the strong sense we once thought.
Hence the British make an assumption when confronted with a culture with different etiquette to their own: theirs must be an act; ours is genuine. The conclusion seems logical from one side of the pond at least: the British etiquette is stripped back, less ornate, less developed. This, therefore, must be somehow ‘true’, ‘authentic’ or ‘original’, like a more basic form of technology.
Is American etiquette any more learned and rehearsed than the British habit of drinking tea in the afternoon? Of offering visitors tea? Of queuing with an almost extremist zeal? The answer, of course, is no. The British habits of bald, minimalist etiquette, are just as learned as these examples.
That’s my ‘I’m a humanities graduate’ analysis over and done with. My takeaway is a lot simpler. I just think the American effort for accommodating people sets a much higher bar and it’s just better. The reason that Brits will never take this kind of etiquette on, however, is because of the above. They are convinced that their characteristics, of being actively apologetic but never actively helpful, is the ur-behaviour. They are convinced that this is the real way to behave, and anything else must be icky. There is no reason to think that this is actually the case, other than petty jingoism. It’s always worth remembering how bad jingoism looks when you’re the less successful sibling, even if you’re the older sibling.
Hmmm, this is interesting.
I may have said to you about our experience of travelling up to Loch Lomond - and we'll be up in Fort William come August so I'll be able to test this again - I think it stands as a bit of a 'test case' for your explanation.
If I haven't mentioned this to you: if you take the train for <an hour from Glasgow up to Balloch, you'll notice an entirely different level of service from people in pubs, restaurants, and other service contexts. Everyone working there is Scottish, and learned the same standards of etiquette and language in childhood as people in Glasgow; but they have to serve American tourists visiting the Highlands - not all the time, maybe Americans are not even a majority of their customers, but they are a critical mass. So staff in the hospitality sector have to be taught to cater to Americans, which means 'over'-friendliness.
The point is that 'over'-friendliness is not necessarily a matter of behaviours that are learned in childhood and then internalised at a deep level. It can instead be a strategic response to pressures and incentives present around adults. Americans _demand_ a higher level of friendliness from those around them than e.g. British people do; and in certain commercial contexts, this demand takes the form of economic demand in the strict sense, incentivising the supply of friendliness. Even outside these contexts, there might be a certain cultural incentive to respond: if you don't meet your conversation partner's expectations for friendliness, you might be read as cold or impolite, so you adjust accordingly.
Learned behaviours in this sense are not quite the same as the internalised learned behaviours that every culture passes onto its children. They are more like what the game theorists call 'strategies' (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/#Games). These are *also* not necessarily disingenuous, but it's not so clear-cut.
As such, I don't think people worry about American disingenuousness just because they don't know how culture works, I think the suspicion is that American friendliness is a strategy rather than a truly internalised norm of culture. If you know that (a) American commercial culture is so strong and powerful in their society, and (b) it's strong enough to issue in 'strategic' over-friendliness even among *non-Americans* so long as they have to interact with Americans, then it's easy to conclude that (c) it surely must be strong enough to produce strategic over-friendliness among Americans.
Of course, the obvious response is that American commercial stronger is *even more powerful* than this: it's strong enough that Americans fully and truly internalise the etiquette that Balloch waitresses just adopt strategically. This, I think, is a fair rebuttal. But it (if anything) is even more worrying.
That's had me pretty much rolling in in the isles ..so funny
And of course an interesting take on things.