Americans are fake and the Dutch are rude (2022)
behavioralscientist.orgAs a Frenchman, when I worked in the valley, people told me to tone it down, that I could come off as rude.
On my side, I wanted to slap those people calling others they barely knew "friends", overselling their lunch as "amazing", assuring an outcome with certainty, virtue signaling or refusing to say when something was completely wrong. It's like they were always in a tiny marketing process.
Eventually, I learned to smooth communication, and to appreciate their enthusiasm.
But it did take time.
Also I must confess I have an American filter permanently on, now. If something comes from the US, I just assume most of it is BS until proven otherwise.
I'm an academic from Europe and routinely tell my PhD students to "be more American" or "write like the Americans" to mean don't be shy exaggerating and presenting their work like much more important than it really is (or perceive it to be).
Because indeed, the American academic culture is full of BS (perhaps the most glaring example being that the cornerstore of hiring is the recommendation letter, which to me is essentially overt nepotism - and in a recommendation letter, every candidate is the best ever, Gauss incarnate, the Chosen One to break the frontiers of knowledge, because if you say even the slightest bad or ambiguous think they're not going to get hired. But everything is like that).
The thing is that in academia everything is competitive (grants, conference acceptances, etc.) so we Europeans must be Americans as well if we want to be successful, because it's hard for a paper, proposal, etc. to get chosen if you're being realistic while some of your rivals are exaggerating everything. This is something I realized when I worked in the UK (not America, of course, but more "American" than the rest of Europe) and then even more when I worked with actual Americans, and I consider this realization to have boosted my career considerably.
Felt the same in Ohio. I'm polish.
Spent 6 months at Ohio State as exchange student and I loved it and hated it.
I remember once being asked how was I and me answering honestly, just for an american friend to reprimend me on actually answering.
I was like, "why the hell you asking how am I if you don't care?".
Got to admit though no place is easier to make friends than US. This excess talking can often lay fertile ground to deeper connection that is harder to find elsewhere.
ISMO on learning american expressions:
Over the past 6 years married to a woman who grew up in China, I've become more aware of how often we Americans say the exact opposite of what they mean, but instead convey their actual meaning through context, tone of voice, or whatever.
It took us about 2 years to really learn how to talk to each other.
Could you give us some examples?
Well, I was in China at a reunion dinner event with my wife a couple weeks back, and she asked me if I wanted some of some dish, and I said, "Sure, ok," where I said it in a way to really mean, "Not so much, but okay, I'll take a bite just to be polite." (It was my wife's class reunion event.) And it kept on going like that for the next 4 or so dishes, and my wife kept on seeing that I was getting more and more annoyed, so she kept on trying to feed me more, which just meant that I kept on getting more stuff I really didn't want to eat.
There are other times which are the opposite. Like, when I ask my wife if she wants some rice or some porridge, and she says very imperatively. "I will do it myself." She actually means straightforwardly, I am going to do it myself, not that she's displeased with me and that she's not going to accept any token from me and is going to punish me in several small ways now. (Which is what many of my ex-girlfriends would have meant.)
It's actually hard to give examples in a text medium like this, because so much of it is really context and tone of voice.
>a woman who grew up in China
That's an odd way to say what you're saying
I assume you're implying they meant she's Chinese.
From GP's text I assumed she's not Chinese but for whatever reason (parents worked there, she was adopted as a grown-ish kid, something else) she spent most of her formative years there.
Maybe we're both wrong but on its face what GP wrote doesn't strike as odd at all to me.
she could be chinese, but given how many chinese live in america, stating that she grew up in china is a helpful distinction.
People in the valley seem to be quite different from people in the southern states (the only part of the US that I have been to). I wonder if the differences within the USA are actually be as significant as the differences between parts of the US and Europe.
Reading through the article, I very much sympathized with the author's Dutch attitudes towards American mannerisms. And I'm American.
All of my life I've felt at a distance from others who exhibit typical American social habits, and have actually got along better with people from various other cultures such as eastern Europe. (There are a lot of first and second generation immigrants from eastern Europe where I live in the US.)
I have always been perceived as rude and blunt, and in recent years those with typically American social attitudes have even begun pathologizing behaviors like mine as being "on the spectrum".
As to why I am like this was a mystery to me in childhood. I acted just like my family and extended did! Everything was normal at home, and then I would treat someone at school like I would treat a sibling and it would result in arched eyebrows.
Turns out my family's attitudes towards socializing were strongly influenced by my mother, since she was a stay at home parent. And she came from a part of the US made up of small agricultural communities that were mostly German and Dutch in origin. These small communities had transplanted their national cultures in little bubbles all over the US, and by dint of mostly isolation from the broader culture had maintained those mores for centuries.
It was only when my mother had moved away to the city that this culture shock occurred, about 150 years after immigration.
So yes, there is a lot of cultural variation in the US, probably not as much as in Europe, but it exists. There are subcultures within the US of various vintages that exist alongside the mainstream culture that have all learned how to be different and coexist at the same time.
When I first visited the US in 1981, I was pretty convinced (as a young, naive and somewhat ignorant Brit) that the differences between someone from New Orleans and someone from Portland, Maine were far greater than anything you could find between any two parts of Europe.
Decades later, that's clearly an exaggeration or just plain wrong, but it is certainly true that people do underestimate cultural differences within the US, and overestimate them within Europe.
I don't think people overestimate the cultural difference between Finland and Italy for example, they are extremely different.
The language barriers makes Europe much more culturally diverse, but also makes that diversity much harder to discover since you can't fully understand a culture without learning its language.
It is more like the cultural difference between Canada and Mexico, you don't have such a wide spread within USA. You have some parts that is more like Canadians, and some parts more like Mexicans, but Mexico to Canada is still a bigger cultural leap than anything within USA.
I think that the language diversity tends to make it less apparent that people are actually more alike than they seem. I am not claiming that Finns and Italians as a culture are identical other than language, just that the language difference makes them seem more different than they actually are.
The opposite is true in the USA: nearly everyone speaking English to each other, watching the same TV shows, driving the same cars, eating the same breakfast cereals - easy to believe they must all be culturally very similar, when in fact they are not.
We know there are differences within countries, but those differences tend to get exaggerated since you live in them. Even in European countries people tend to say "People from city X are very brash, people from city Y are very warm and welcoming", so they know that even though they consume the same news, speak the same language etc things can be different. Or they say "People from area X are very racist, area Y is very liberal".
But we also know that there are much bigger differences if you cross many national borders and language barriers by going to the other side of Europe, they too will have those micro differences but when going there you also get many major macro differences.
Case in point: in German, we even have the same words. They are mildly antiquated, but "Gesellig" and "Geselle" are almost 1:1 translations from the Dutch "gezellig" and "gezel". As a German who has worked in the Netherlands, I never felt a big difference in everyday attitude (though I have to admit the company is based very near to the German border, so maybe the differences would be bigger when compared to Amsterdam or something).
So, where do you stand on Oachkatzlschwoaf versus Eichhörnchenschwanz? O:-)
As a middle-western German, it's obviously Eichhörnchenschwanz! Haha ;)
Even more, in north western Germany they have a dialect called "Plattdeutsch" that is closer to the Dutch language than to German.
https://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsilfaanisch_Deitsch The Pennsylvania 'Dutch' Pälzisch dialect is enough to give a headache... https://pfl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riograndenser_Hunsr%C3%BCckis... Pälz-Portuguese creole
As someone who recently moved from The Netherlands to USA, I found this article to be really great at explaining the reason why many Europeans find Americans to be fake. I myself had experienced all of the social experiences the author talked about, and found myself confused as to what a "friend" was in The USA. I also find it very interesting how the author described emotions as cultured - not just something which was the same to everyone.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts and experiences with different cultures.
Here's a cultural question I've been wondering since I visited Amsterdam as an American- I was walking along an up hill street in the evening, and I saw a young lady talking to her friends and smoking, with a baby in a stroller. The stroller started to roll down the hill slightly and she didn't seem to notice. It then picked up a little speed, so I moved to intercept it, and rolled it back up to her. When I delivered her child back to her she just looked at me with a slightly blank look, then gave a very quick barking laugh, and turned back to her friends. We didn't exchange any words. I moved on and went about my business, but to this day I have absolutely zero idea what her reaction meant <shrug>.
Hill? In Amsterdam? Suspicious detail!
Amsterdam is a city of many mountains: the bridges over the canals.
A bit ashamed probably, but definitely not the reaction you would expect from a Dutch person who almost lost her pram. A normal reaction would include a 'thank you' and maybe a joke to justify the act.
We live in a bizarro world.
Not sure if that was what she meant, I wasnt there. But if I responded that way, this would be the meaning.
> Amsterdam
> up hill street
?
Do you mean a highway ramp or a bridge?
Maybe that’s a cultural difference as well (?)
I’m a non-american living in Austin, TX and what folks call hills here is different from what we call hills back home…
Lol, I know, I think I found the only hill in Amsterdam. Perhaps 'incline' would be a better description? Maximum elevation is Amsterdamn is 18m and minimum is -8m (according to the website I just looked at) so there has to be some inclines about and I clearly hit one.
Cultural differences aren't limited to international interactions either. Here's an interesting thing about exclamation points. Apparently there are (at least) two cultures of exclamation point usage in English. Apparently one culture uses them frequently as a marker of expressing general excitedness. The other culture sees them akin to yelling, which is appropriate only a small fraction of the time.
Interestingly I became aware of a similar cultural difference regarding punctuation: I frequently use three dots ‚…‘ in more informal emails at the end of a sentence to indicate that I am not sure about something yet or still wondering about it. Like „I guess we could discuss this tomorrow…“ or „Yeah, I might be able to do this…“
Some month ago an Italian PhD student of mine (I’m from Germany) asked me if I was upset or mad at him. I had no idea why he was asking and was completely taken aback by this suggestion. But turns out, in Italy (at least the northern part of it), the three dots typically indicate that you are upset or at least impatient with the receiver.
I still wonder how many of my Italian collaborators I have sent strange impatient emails in the past…
In the same vein, it makes a huge difference in a chat conversation if you finish your sentence with a dot or not. Writing something like:
I’ll see you there.
Has a very different vibe than:
I’ll see you there
Where the first one, with a dot, would signal the sender is mad or impatient while the latter is neutral.
I’ll see you there…
This one however… I’d also assume the sender is impatient because I just told them I’m gonna be late, or something bad happened („there“ being a funeral for example), or it’s unclear whether we will both arrive (a heavy storm might be coming, possibly blocking roads).
I think the ellipses have that connotation in a lot of places and kind of like with all-caps and exclamation marks, it doesn't seem as strongly connected to culture.
Some of my Indian friends use it the same way as you do, which often throws off some of my American friends, who interpret it as impatience, and vice versa.
A nice Indian lady I used to work with was horrified when I pointed out that her use of the "eye rolling" emoji is seen as rude and dismissive by lots of people.
It's always worth being aware of these differences if you can be and also giving people the benefit of the doubt too.
American, and I almost started a fight or maybe more like almost hurt my Filipina wife's feelings one time when I tried to complain about a certain, idk facial gesture? she does in certain cases, that just reads a certain way to me and is apparently not at all what she means.
I'll be saying something, and she'll raise her eyebrows up and down twice. To me it looks almost like Groucho Marx, and looks like someone thinks you are joking or saying something silly, and are responding with a non-verbal "oh really?" Or maybe like a suggestive flirting thing, except totally out of any flirting context, so wth does flirty suggestive eyes mean when you were talking about figuring out which outlets to plug the kitchen appliances into so that they don't trip the breakers? It just throws me right off the horse and all I can think is "WTF IS THAT?"
We're old enough and adult and frank enough that I can simply say everything I just said here and we tried to figure it out. It simply became the interesting thing we talked about for a while that day. But she could not explain it. So I never got an answer. It's just something she does unconsciously and apparently is not meant to deflate or derail or laugh at whatever I was talking about. It's apparently more like an actual "oh really?"
I never saw her even-more-filipina mom do it, nor her brother or sister or other family members, and she actually mostly grew up in the us and a few years in China but in a special place with all the other foreign people as her mom worked for the UN. So it may have nothing to do with the Philipines, or China.
So a little eye-waggle can be like that.
Update: I just told her I cited her in this conversation, and now she tells me her family and extended family does all do it, just I'm not around them enough to have seen it, and it is a phillipino thing, and it means I understand or agree like what I would do with a head nod.
Hate to break it to you, but it has the same subtext here in Germany
Hmm, interesting. I really wonder how I could miss this all my life. (Would have made them here as well, but not anymore)
Edit: spelling
To be fair, maybe I was a bit quick with this claim, I think it works across languages and is more of a generational thing, strange Reddit link (sorry) but I feel like this explains it pretty well:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs...
With the ellipsis I do feel like the tone is very context dependent.
Ha, it’s just that I am old ;-) Thanks for the link!
I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU COULD MEAN BY THAT.
You forgot the exclamationistas, related to the commakazis, who just pour them!!! everywhere!!! whether!!! it makes sense!! or not!!!!
This exactly!
There is a huge different between a blue collar New Yorker and a Palo Alto techie in culture though. I’ll take the nyc rudeness over the fake politeness in California. As a European I fund New Yorkers much easier to connect and befriend people than people from both the pacific coast.
Same. NYC types will tell you to go fuck yourself on the street for walking on the wrong half of the sidewalk, and will give you the finger for basically any reason. But in private I found most of them to be warm, vibrant people. And, paradoxically, when I slipped on the street, random strangers were immediately jumping to my side to see if I'm okay and helping me up.
To paraphrase an old boss who was from NJ: we respect you enough to stab you in the front, and never in the back.
California, by comparison, was just as ruthless as Wall Street corpo raiders, but with a thick veneer of BS smattered all over it.
This article about Russian's habit of yelling is interesting: https://classical-russian-literature.blogspot.com/2020/07/th...
I haven't been to Russia but some of it reminds me of encounters I've had in Greece.
As a Russian living among Greeks I can not say that I experienced any unusual rudeness. But yes, permanent smiling may be considered to be deceptive and insincere by some Russians.
But anyway: people tend to express themself in many different ways. It is great to be tolerant to others, while trying to be polite and culture-aware yourself.
The interactions I had--some of them, I should add--in Greece were combative from an American perspective and not a Russian one. If the scenes described in the link are typical of Russian life, then the Greeks I encountered indeed probably would not strike a Russian as rude.
A couple of questions/observations as someone born in the UK who emigrated to the US at 25.
1. I wonder when this "difference between culture-driven emotions" fades away. I've been in the US for 35 years now, and I still sometimes sense that I'm viewing interactions the way a British person would (less often than I used to)
2. I wonder how the "noise" of differences between individuals compares in "amplitude" to the ability of culture to shape emotion. Any given population of any significant size will likely contain fairly wide variations of introversion, sociability, communication comfort, positivity, etc. etc. To what extent does or can cultural factors create any sort of coherent pattern "on top" of that variation?
3. Some US habits can be seen as having nothing to do with the relationships between individuals, and everything to do with creating certain social moods. The reason that US retail interactions are studded with "Have a nice day" is not, in general, because anyone actually cares that much about whether your day is nice or not, but because having people behaving in that way creates an easy going, affable mood in which people's anger, disappointment and sadness of the moment is not really appropriate to bring to the surface. It can seem grating and "fake" on early encounters with it, but after a while (maybe a long while), you can appreciate it as a communal, non-coercive effort to "make nice" because everyone benefits from that, on average and over time.
4. US English really needs to re-acquaint (no pun intend) itself with the word "acquaintance" as an alternative to "friend". The almost universal use of "friend" to describe anyone you know (even from the most singular and minor of interactions) really robs verbal behavior about the social environment here of so much subtlety.
> 4. US English really needs to re-acquaint (no pun intend) itself with the word "acquaintance" as an alternative to "friend". The almost universal use of "friend" to describe anyone you know (even from the most singular and minor of interactions) really robs verbal behavior about the social environment here of so much subtlety
Well, we just call them brothers or sisters if they are that close. Actually…
I'm not sure what it means about me that I can't tell if you're joking or not.
As a Brit I have one friend I've known since childhood I'd call "brother" unironically. Even then I'd probably have to have been drinking.
You can see the same thing with "neighbor". In the UK that refers to someone who lives in one of the houses adjacent to yours. In the USA it can refer to anyone who lives anywhere in some loosely-defined neighborhood. "My neighbor" can be someone who lives a mile or two away, which by UK standards is absurd.
The King James Version of the Bible used "neighbor" in this same vague way when Jesus said to love our neighbor. Nothing new in that usage.
Also useful: "colleague"
American living in America. I've encountered all types of people. Some are taciturn, some are very direct, some dance around the subject for fear of offending, some are excessively friendly. We're a mix of cultures and I don't think you can say that all or even most Americans have the same social/emotional tendencies.
Our worlds are so different. I live in rural Massachusetts, it's a slower pace of life than New York City. People, on average, in extremely different environments will value different things and act differently. It's not 'rude' for a busy lunch place in NYC to expect you to order and get out of the way. They need to feed 15 million people.
They “need” as if they were some sort of soup kitchen for the needy and not an expensive-as-fuck posh place. They can fuck right off, I’ll take my time enjoying the food and use of the premises that I paid for, thank you very much.
Christ that escalated quickly…
Nowhere in American is asking “how are you today” to a cashier abnormal. But the article suggests that it is indeed abnormal from a a Dutch perspective.
There are distinctly American customs and cultures that Europeans would look as stereotypically American.
asking someone how they are in the netherlands is considered a genuine question about someone's wellbeing, and is considered very out of place if you don't know the person. (a cashier for instance).
Also, when asking this, expect a real response back.
It's not necessarily all that different in the US. I often respond honestly when asked (if I'm not focused on other things), and similarly, I often get honest responses too (eg store cashiers on a slow day).
Just because they're saying "I'm alright" instead of pouring their heart out about how they had one customer earlier who caused a lot of trouble, doesn't mean that they aren't being honest.
Q. How do you astonish an american?
A. When they ask how you are, tell them.
I agree it's not abnormal, but it's not abnormal to not ask, either.
I would never initiate a casual conversation with a cashier. If the cashier asks me how I am today, I'll say "fine, thanks." and that's it.
While I understand the meaning of this comment and see its value, I wonder how you would know to which extend it weakens the initial thesis, though.
If some people live in an island where some place are around 10 degrees and other around 15 degrees, they may say "our island is very diverse, look, yesterday I went to the south, and it was freezing! 10 degrees! it's 5 degrees less than here!"
I understand you see the differences in people you meet in your same culture. But how do you even see the similarities, if you have no experience of other cultures?
I wonder if the dutch history is why most new yorkers seem to be very direct. There are definitely different regions of America that pull the fake thing more than others (one example I can think of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bless_your_heart )
It's opportunity cost. New Yorkers making $300,000 feel the twinge of lost time much more acutely than, say, the average Minnesotan making $30,000.
Indeed, in most countries, you'll notice the dialect of the capital city of the prominent language contains a lot more clipped and shortened words than the rural dialects tend to. This happens here in Finland - Helsinkians speak a much more abbreviation heavy Finnish than the dairy farmers up in Pohjois-Pohjanmaa, which has sort of the equivalent of Finnish southern drawl.
Huh, why is this downvoted?
In the Netherlands, efficiency is part of communicaton, especially in cities. In more rural places people connect a bit more and take time for eachother. These are different rules.
And yes, sometimes Dutch people are rude because they like to be. Different people, different strokes.
I didn't downvote the comment myself, but I do think it's glib and reductionist in a way that purely economic arguments often are. In general I find explanations of this kind of behaviors are often facile rationalizations of things that are mostly non-rational and that are absorbed from one's social environment and then imitated.
> Huh, why is this downvoted?
Because tying it to salary seems pseudo-scentific and rather snobbish (but happy to be corrected if there is solid science backing it). Are rich people generally more direct than poor people within a culture? Not in my experience.
The distinction between urban and rural is valid in my experience. But the urban poor tend to be on the same side of this divide as the urban rich.
(edit: Just to be clear, I didn't downvote it)
As someone from "Bless your heart" country, there is nothing fake (or secret) about it. It is used in two context and everyone there knows exactly which one is meant when directed at them or others.
A passive aggressive dig, or, a genuine statement of care. However, I can definitely see how people who did not grow up around it may see it as fake or weird or question intent.
> I can definitely see how people who did not grow up around it may see it as fake or weird or question intent.
That is the whole point, what words mean changes from culture to culture, punitiveness is relative. In some culture "great" is the neutral word, in other it is "it is ok" is the neutral one etc, so when a culture who feels "great" must mean you like it a lot come to a culture where it is just the normal thing to say they will feel everyone is fake since they say that things are great even though they aren't particularly excited about those things.
People in lots of the Northeast are, of course, known to be a bit brusque or direct, including the non-Dutch areas. I think it’s just that it has been a busy, high population area for a long time (by US standards at least). When you and everyone around you has to do lots of little interactions all day, you show care by keeping things short and efficient.
Also “bless your heart” is the dumbest expression in the world. Oh wow look at me I’ve said something that sounds nice, but actually it means something secretly rude, maybe, but only I know how I meant it! That’s just poor communication.
These are the stereotypes: (that mostly track my experiences living in different parts of the country)
In the northeast, people are kind but not nice. They'll help you out when you have flat tire but may grumble under their breath that you might need to learn how to change your tires yourself. It takes a long time to get to know them, but once you do, they'll take their shirts off their backs for you.
In the pacific northwest, people are nice but not kind. They'll be super polite to you but when you ask for help or ask to hang out, they'll snub you. They're mostly homebodies and they already have enough friends, no room for more.
In the midwest, people are kind and nice. They'll help you out and they'll invite you to their homes for a meal. But they are somewhat cautious of outsiders.
In the south, people mostly just have a nice façade that is skin deep. They'll be nice and friendly to you and talk to you all day, but they may not care that much for you at all. Their friendliness is more about them wanting to feel that they are nice people, and less about them actually caring about you. Many will talk behind your back ("bless your heart" culture).
Terms like Seattle Freeze, Minnesota Nice, Southern Hospitality are all overgeneralizations and don't apply to each individual, but nevertheless capture a part of the culture that is at least somewhat true.
For instance, a 2008 survey showed WA state ranked 48th out of 50 in trait extraversion. Seattle definitely feels socially different from other places -- it is very palpable.
Here's the paper ranking 50 US states on the Five Factor model (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness)
https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/research/papers/others/2008/rentfr...
The only thing I don’t really like about the “kind but not nice” formulation is that (as someone from the Northeast), it seems to give us, like, the obviously good trait. At least I read it as implying pretty heavily by separating out “kind” and “nice” that “kind” is the authentic and important thing and “nice” is some superficial and therefor not as good trait. So I would feel too self-congratulatory, using it.
I prefer to think we all just have different ways of showing that we care.
> it seems to give us, like, the obviously good trait
That is from your perspective, everyone think that their culture is the "obviously good one", we value what we were taught to value. You value those traits since you came from that culture, a person from a "show happiness and spread warmth" culture will think that their way is the obviously superior one and that the culture you think is superior is making the worse bleak and depressing so not good at all.
I mean, I can see a positive reading of the other “kind” description, the Midwest. And I think it is sort of telling that the original commenter felt the need to sort of balance it out with a negative note about perceptions of outsiders, there.
Fine, you could quibble about perspectives for most of the other ones, but it seems like an abjectly negative description of the South.
I have a long history of trouble with intimacy and long-term relationships, and as a result, I live alone and rather isolated. I have a few friends on FB and others who I email on a regular basis, and I try to cultivate closeness with them as much as electronically possible.
But many of my social interactions are based in commerce. So I'll go to a restaurant to eat, alone. I'll go grocery shopping, alone. And so the clerk/cashier/waitress greets me and serves me and of course they're nice, because their wages are on the line here. And gradually I just felt fake and futile, because all these pleasantries we exchanged had an undercurrent of a business transaction and not the bonds of trust, fraternity, an actual relationship.
Yes, it does feel really hollow when I enter a store and the clerk greets me enthusiastically, because they don't know me, and any concern for one another's feelings, that's merely a business transaction. I tire of this fakery.
As someone who worked a long time in service (not in America, in the anecdotally much more socially cold Germany) I was friendly and welcoming to all customers (unless I had a really bad day for some reason, so about 95% of the time) and I always meant it.
It just makes your work much more fun and time pass faster than being sullen and distanced. It hs nothing to do with my wages being on the line, I literally had zero obligation to be nice to customers. But every once in a while I had a pleasant interaction and that made it worth the effort.
I would bet it’s the same for your crockery clerks. That kind of work is very boring and repetitive and social interaction is the only respite you get from it. Just something to keep in mind when you are feeling cynical about them greeting you friendly and so on.
Thank you for sharing.
You are not alone.
As an American in Finland I'm sure plenty of Finnish people think my mannerisms come off as fake. But I just figure the best of them will take my natural bubbliness as a fun treat, something a bit different from the otherwise reserved nature of the culture here. There's very little to be sad about in my life, especially given that I get to live in such a lovely country, and I'm not shy about showing it. :)
Two Finish people are sitting at a bar and drinking beer.
First Fin says "Skoll!" (Cheers)
Second Fin asks "Are we here to drink or to talk?"
Mind you being nice is not the same thing as being genuine.
The problem is not with advertising ( or over advertising ) that youre happy when your are indeed happy.
The problem is with not doing so when the situation is inversed - that is advertising youre unhappy when you are indeed unhappy - and couching it in good cheer for outward appearances.
People in most cultures value genuineness over fake cheer although no one really is fully immune to fake cheerfulness and often find themselves falling for it - even when they want to fight it. Because in the end after all the cake and watermelon, its a form of deceitful presentation of the self - whether the person intended it or not. It trips you up in your read of the other person and thus leads to a maladjusted state of affairs where you are forever adjusting and hedging your reactions to the others person true emotions. Its a tax on your mental faculties.
this is a really great attitude, and as someone who's lived in Germany, it can be a really hard thing to do. In the end we are who we are. You can go crazy trying to fit in or try to let it go and stop caring about the stares and disapproving looks.
> Thank you for dinner” felt to me as an act of distancing
Is this really? I am French so we are rather private (in the sense that friendship is something that takes time, and before that there are rather generic interactions). But if my best friend whom I adore and whatnot did a dinner for me I would thank him very much.
I wild be surprised if "thank you" is not used between friends in the Netherlands
I'm Dutch and I'd also think a "thank you for dinner" feels like: "Thanks for the meal, but not all the other things (like the gezelligheid).". The meal you can get anywhere. But the gezelligheid is the connection, the real thing to be grateful for. If you leave sooner than expected you also need a bit of a good reason. We have this rhyme (my grand parents had in on a tile in the hallway):
"Wie hier als vriend naar binnen gaat, komt nooit te vroeg maar steeds te laat"?
Meaning:
"Who enters here as a friend will never be early but always late."
I have to say, I'm like that, my wife definitely isn't, so it's not really a law of nature. But where I live (in the south) it's common for friends to just walk around the back of the house and walk into the door unannounced, it's a sign of true closeness. Though I also think that is getting less common. Idk, might be the internet diluting all cultures.
> Thank you for dinner” felt to me as an act of distancing
True story. One of the major times I almost broke up (before we got married) with my wife, who grew up in Fujian China, is the first time I told her, "I love you," and she replied, "Thank you." (Now, on our anniversary, I might get her a bouquet with a note saying, "You're welcome.")
First time I almost broke up with her before we married was our very first date, when she was 45 minutes late. She finally called me, telling me that the CEO came in at the last moment with a new idea, and that she would be there as soon as she could. Afterwards, she was an additional 45 minutes late, because just after she got off the phone, the CEO came in with another idea. Where she's from, where she grew up, this kind of thing is just unfortunate but, "understandable."
I think part of the reason was what was missing:
> I would have liked my guests to say that they were looking forward to spending more time with me, that they really liked the evening together, or that they felt happy or connected to me.
As a Dutch person, I think saying "Thanks for dinner, was fun!" is fine, but I could see how saying just the first part, or focusing too much on the effort spent on the food, could make me suspicious, as if that was the most positive thing that can be said about the evening.
Also, I think it's quite common to exchange a few words about when one might meet next, either concretely ("See you at X event?") or vaguely ("Let's meet again sometime soon!"). If it's left out, one might suspect the other party doesn't want to meet again, perhaps.
Yes, it can be used. Depending on different nuances and intonations, it can be considered polite and distancing, or authentic and meant for connecting.
I don't fully buy the points being made, I agree that emotions are cultured, but as someone from a different culture, I've felt that Americans are more "genuine".
My own culture is all about distrusting others and being very selective about what you reveal about yourself and paying close attention to material balance in social interactions so someone else isn't getting more out of the relationship than you. A point that came up last time I was visiting my home country was that my habit of thanking the cashier after finishing my transaction was a glaring giveaway that I was an outsider, and that I should be careful about it to avoid being taken advantage of.
In comparison, American culture has been very freeing, I can typically trust people to not be trying to stab me in the back, I don't have to worry as much about taking advantage of by friends, I can ask people to be honest about me and they will be, and so on.
There are a lot of little pleasantries with strangers that took time to become fluent at, but people you actually know seem to be just as honest as what the author describes the Dutch as being, just with a lot of initial padding like "please don't take this the wrong way".
The example given of being asked to dinner and responding bluntly with "I'm busy tomorrow" doesn't seem that rude to me, but to be fair, I am in a physics and engineering environment, neither groups of people being known for their social smoothness :)
I don't believe Americans are fake, but I do believe that Americans are trained since an early age to display at all times that they're not a threat, and that is kind of sad.
I would hazard that this is a function of our Wild West/Frontier culture. America had individual gun ownership since inception. Unlike Europe where lethal weapons/training were not available to every level of the social strata. America was a free-for-all for a very long time with very different cultures clashing constantly. You did not want to present as a threat in a world like that. I wonder if this is still common in less developed countries where life is cheap and access to lethality is easy.
More contemporarily, I can speak specifically to black culture- if you're black interacting with white strangers in a foreign environment, you may find yourself being overtly friendly to strangers simply as a means to compensate against any potential stereotypes. I'm sure being a minority in any situation can elicit this reaction though, including being a white minority. And I've also experience d the opposite, where I'm a "white" minority- and I had to simultaneously present myself as not being a threat, but also not an easy victim.
>I do believe that Americans are trained since an early age to display at all times that they're not a threat
Interesting. Since I'm the fish who can't see the water, could you provide me with some examples of this?
Just look at how some primates use an abundance of facial muscles to establish they're not a threat. Or how having the local accent can show you are not an invader. The sing-songy greetings,the smiles, etc, can be read as demonstrations that you are not a threat. Americans have to do that in almost all times and contexts.
This is an interesting point, but I think the reason for it is a little different than you're suggesting.
When I was younger and would go hiking or climbing in Scotland and Wales, I would definitely have to be quite mindful of "showing I was not a threat" when entering small village stores and pubs there.
The more densely and contiguously populated and area is, the easier it is to (a) feel a part of the "in group" (b) not feel aware of the difference between "insiders" and "outsiders".
My experience is that the behavior you describe in Americans is roughly proportional to population density and tourism levels. Areas with lots of people and/or lots of visitors do not require this "low threat establishment". Areas with less people and/or less visitors often do so. I think this is true of Europe just as much as the USA, and I would guess it is probably the same worldwide.
A while back we spent 5 weeks in the US, visiting a handful of states (California, Arizona, Nevada etc). The people we met were universally polite and often kind (except for one drunk English guy). A random person on a bus noticed we were tourists and spent ages giving us recommendations for local things to do; retail workers would notice our accent and ask about the bushfires (this was late 2019 when half of Australia was burning).
However, pretty much the whole time it felt a bit like we were being boisterous in church. As polite as everyone was, it felt at least in part fake; like they were a bad actor over-playing a role; like they were tolerating us but wished we'd just shut up and leave. Conversations felt shallow - if I actually responded with anything of substance about the bushfires, for example, they seemed to lose interest immediately. There was a sense of guardedness that meant I could rarely tell when anyone actually thought. Australians are typically rather... open in that respect.
As we were lining up to board our flight home, I heard groups of other Australians talking and instantly let of of a tension I hadn't realized I was carrying. Like I'd walked out of church and was allowed to act normally again.
> When my son’s teacher told my mom she was being appreciated as a grandmother, she emphasized that my mom was special to her grandchildren— a domain over which she could claim to have some authority, being the teacher of my son. This is not fake at all: it is just a feeling that comes from a focus on those features or accomplishments that would give the other person reason to feel good about themselves. You are a wonderful grandmother [...]
But here's what I don't understand. The teacher doesn't actually know whether her mother was a wonderful grandmother -- after all, she just got to know her! I get that the intent is to make another person feel good about themselves, but if you praise anything and everyone, how does this praise convey anything special?
Edit: I guess my actual question is this: How do you tell plain courtesy from actual commendation? When do you know someone actually means it?
> I get that the intent is to make another person feel good about themselves, but if you praise anything and everyone, how does this praise convey anything special?
i have noticed that the inverse also exists.
Especially in northern/eastern europe.
Calling out the cynical truth and how everything is bad but could also be so much worse seems to be way for people to connect. This often happens in a crisis situation aswell.
I think it can be reasonably believed that the teacher must've meant it. She doesn't know the grandmother, but she does know the kids, and kids tend to be fairly open about excitedly telling their friends that their grandma is visiting. Eg my niece's teachers know she really enjoys it when I visit despite never having met me because she draws me often.
It can also just be seen as an appreciation towards the grandmother for being there enough for the kids to come to the meeting.
Dutchman living in NYC; this article is spot on. It gets slightly easier with time, but I've been here ~9 years and I still feel it.
As an American living in America, I've had a hard time fitting in to many social situations because it's difficult for me to "be fake", and it feels very awkward when people "act fake" with me. I appreciate some aspects of American social culture, but the forced "niceness" and fake compliments/questions irk me.
My ideal style is somewhere between Dutch directness and American friendliness - mostly direct, but with a generally more "positive" affect than the "neutral"-seeming Dutch approach, and more open to having friendly interactions with strangers without being "fake".
Haha, this is a cluster of things.
- Americans do reduce social distance with phatic conversation. "how are you?" "Good, how about yourself?"
- Americans do have expected formal acknowledgements. There are a few cultures where formality is a sign of adding social distance, but in America it's definitely an acknowledgement. In another culture the emphasis will be on how much you liked the thing, but in the US, it is important to say "thank you"
- There is a lot of fake positivity in the US for sure. For instance, you'll see this online with "I don't know who needs to hear this but YOU ARE LOVED". That's a strange sentiment to express. How could you know?
But ultimately it's mostly just words. The sentiments expressed are the same and the language is just different. It might just be a thing among Anglophones since the British are somehow worse about the word / intention mismatch though without the enthusiasm.
This does remind me of that Reddit thread where an Eastern European asks "Guys, what is a chamicha? My American colleagues always compliment me on it and I thank them and we go on." where it was discovered that it was "Nice to meet you".
“There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.”
The few Dutch folks I know are indeed kind of rude. One time I (Brazilian) went out to get some drinks with some Dutch friends and, omg, they spent the whole night trashing other people. I am accostumed to do it in a much more delicate way, while they didn't hold it back for a second.
That is considered rude in the Netherlands as well. But yes, many people do it. And you know that if you are out of sight, they will talk that way about you. It's a certain way of lashing out or letting go in an emotional way, some way to survive the complexity of life. It is correct to call it ugly. It can even be correct to talk to people about what they are doing. Ofcourse, if people are old and set in their ways, there is no helping. But young people can still be educated.
There is some idea that you need to be "strong" (whatever that is) or "fit in", which is just wrong to me. If you don't, people judge you and talk bad about you. I know lots of people who do it about many people, even their closest friends.
Dutch directness, and as a consequence rudeness, is legendary. They'd be world champions at it. Add in a fair amount of arrogance and you've got a reasonable chance of being on the end of what most would describe as them being rude.
Here's an example, Two middle aged British couples go to a bar in Amsterdam, and quietly sit at a table in the corner having a few drinks. The bar then becomes a Karaoke bar filled with student aged locals who are very raucous, spilling drinks etc. At the end of the night, one of the men from one of the couples goes to the bar and gives the barman a tip equal to about 20% of that tables spend. The barman then proceeds to tell the man "I dislike British women". The Dutch barman thought that was acceptable and that there would be no recourse. If that were said in many parts of the UK there's a chance the barman would have a pint glass thrown at his head for saying such a rude and out of nowhere thing.
As a Brit who has been to many, many European countries, I can say there's only really two countries that are really different and that's France and The Netherlands. Neither of their general population really feels any obligation to be courteous or polite to foreigners. The locals from every other European country I've been to have been polite/not rude as a bare minimum.
Your singular experience may not be representative of all Dutch...
Yeah, maybe. I guess what stood out the most was not exactly the trashing part (which we all do some way or another), but how they didn't feel the need to soften the words. Since I was the only one who seemed a bit shocked by that, I thought that was perhaps cultural.
It was always fun seeing new people at the US company I've been working in Germany. The way the Germans fell for all the BS sweet talk in the beginning and just couldn't believe that it actually is BS when you warned them until they actually felt it. It lead to some weird conversations, especially when they tried to clear up a situation which has been created through US BS corporate talk. You had the German speaking the plain facts vs. the American who on one had had to keep their cool, keep the BS running AND somehow deliver the actual message because in the end it was important.
Somehow the Germans learned faster, though.
I moved from the UK to Japan four years ago. The biggest culture shock hasn't been interacting with Japanese people, it's been interacting with Americans.
So am I alone in being offended that my android mobile addresses me per du (tutoyer/jij zeggen)?
We have only recently made each other's acquaintance; we are not friends (we haven't even shared a meal, let alone a glass); and it can't even presume to practise the same sports I do. What gives?
> when my friend Ann Kring pointedly commented, “Thank you for sharing,” after I had explained in great detail some convoluted story about my emotions
I cannot of course claim to know the intention of this person, but I have heard this phrase said ostensibly genuinely (to me it has the association of group therapy, though that might be due to popular media).
However, to me as a Dutch person, it comes across as devoid of meaning, a phrase that can be said if one didn't bother to listen or care to come up with any thought or more meaningful response. So, it doesn't surprise me that the author read it as sarcastic (although she might've been right, again I can't know).
The social expectation in the Netherlands to always come up with a response and share your opinion or thoughts, rather than just listening silently and nod (or say “Thank you for sharing,” which to me amounts to almost the same thing) can be criticized as well, of course. It can be a bit exhausting, at times. But, it also contributes to the feeling of having a genuine connection and conversation.
So which is it? Do you want fake civility or sincere rudeness?
The whole point is is that it’s not fake, it feels fake to us, and we (I’m Dutch) are not rude, it feels rude to Americans. We value different things. They are trying to be nice by making compliments, we try to connect by being brutally honest (orthogonal but both positive?). I can tell you our Dutch waiters can learn a thing or two from their US counterparts about service (well maybe it’s also because we hardly tip, but still).
Germans are already different by the way, my German colleague was a bit shocked when he had a hair cut and one colleague walked in asking if he tried to do it himself followed by another asking if he fell down the stairs. It’s camaraderie, I guess mostly in younger people. Honestly his hair wasn’t bad at all.
tipping in my opinion is rather rude.
as a bussiness, you are basically asking for a handout to make the lives of your waiting staff bearable. In my opinion this mean you should not run a business.
Why would i tip someone when they do their job? Should we do this for all jobs? (the same goes for the military in my opinion).
I am (or was) fundamentally against tipping, and I agree that people should simply get paid to do their job.
However, I've followed the debates occuring in the USA as a handful of restaurants have experimented with no-tip policies, and I am now really ambivalent about the practice. Several restaurants with owners who sounded very committed to end tipping have returned to it; I've read remarks from many waitstaff who say that they prefer and can make far more that way than they would ever be paid on a salary.
I don't think there's a clear answer. My gut still tells me that it's a bad idea, but I do not want to ignore stories from those actually working in and around businesses where this is a thing.
One frequent criticism of tipping is that its rewards are distributed unevenly among workers, based on traits such as gender and physical appearance. When reading remarks from tipped workers, have you noticed any correlations with these traits?
I don't think the remarks have come with enough context to meaningfully comment on that.
Having said that, I strongly suspect you're correct about that, though I'd also guess that personality traits are also a very important component, and those are also not handed out "fairly".
The author is a cultural psychologist, and trying to explain that people's emotions should be seen in the context of (and I would say are "relative to") the culture they're from. Someone is only fake if they're more fake than their cultural norms, and someone is only rude if they're more rude than their cultural norms. I would argue this also means people aren't objectively fake or rude, it's all relative, and so neither is objectively better or worse.
I'm between a 1/8 and a 1/4 dutch and I emphasize with what the speaker is saying, sounds like the Dutch may be my people.
I don't think you know rudeness until you've had to deal with Portuguese bureaucracy.
It's so blunt it actually makes me laugh.
I've suspected Postel's law applies to human communication also, mutatis mutandis.
Dutch are so direct and straightforward that one must draw a line when dealing with them.
> This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.
From the classic https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet... referenced elsewhere like in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703
Alcohol will smoothen our cultural differences! /s
i hate everyone. every single nationality bores me to death. most humans are a waste of perfectly good atoms. this whole planet is a cosmic turd.
i don't even like myself ! i'm the worst of all humans on this planet.
If you want evidence of the success of liars in America, just look at Trump.