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Tend? Perhaps. I've lived, worked and traveled all over the U.S. The smallest town I lived in was Sherwood, Maryland (population 44 at the time), and I now live

Tend? Perhaps. I've lived, worked and traveled all over the U.S. The smallest town I lived in was Sherwood, Maryland (population 44 at the time), and I now live an hour outside NYC. It really totally depends on the person you're interacting with, their personality, the kind of day they're having, the days they had before that. Culture certainly determines a lot of it, but that is harder to reduce to small town/big town dynamics. In America some of our most densely populated places (i.e. New Jersey) have some of the lowest rates of depression and suicide. People may appear to be ruder to each other in those places, or not, but something about the proximity of so many other humans creates some sort of social behavioral order that allows them to get along. People are strange, is really the tl;dr.

username223 9y ago
> People are strange, is really the tl;dr. My tl;dr would be "the US is big and complicated." I've seen people working stressful service jobs be incredibly polite in Houston, and baristas being checked-out jerks in small-town Colorado. Overall, I would say that people tend to be more polite when they have more mental energy to spend. That tends to be in quieter towns, but not always.
humanrebar 9y ago
It seems to me that when you interact with fewer people per day, you can put more time and energy into courtesy. There's also a higher chance you'll run into someone again, so there's more incentive to treat strangers well. And small towns tend to be less diverse, meaning there are fewer incidents of rudeness resulting from different cultural expectations.