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.
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.