Instrinsic Social Skills: Small Towns vs Big Cities

PART I. People from small towns find even setting foot in a big city scary - because you have so many more interactions with strangers, you're forced to make frequent decisions about the kind of relationship you're going to have with that person (even if it's for three seconds) and there is sometimes genuine conflict. You can split social interactions with strangers into three tiers.

Tier 1: ignoring strangers, avoiding eye contact, maybe slightly altering your direction of travel to avoid bumping into somebody. The default mode. Note that people in big cities are famous for sticking to this mode more often.

Tier 2: interactions where you acknowledge each other but that are largely ceremonial; e.g. asking someone at a restaurant if you can take a chair they're not using from their table. You'd be surprised by anything but a quick yes.

Tier 3: interacting with strangers in a situation where there are potential divergent interests to navigate, and negotiation and emotional-regulation (of both self and other party) are important; e.g., saying something when someone jumps the line, asking someone for their phone number, asking someone to move their car.


PART II. I had these reflections as I was walking back to my hotel from getting pizza on a Saturday night in Manhattan, categorizing types of social interactions (a very unlikely thing to do if you have innately high social intelligence) and realized that a place like New York does a big favor for people who do NOT have high social intelligence.

One of the things I pay attention to when I visit any big, dense city is the social perceptiveness and effectiveness of people living there. Do they read people well, and are they smoother? (How would you measure this? Not sure overall, but some proxy indicators: automatically understanding the intentions of people they interact with, rate at which they perceive new unspoken hierarchy structures, ability to defuse conflict.) My prediction would be that they're better at these things, because of practice, and they do seem to be a little bit better, but not dramatically so. (In truth, this is mostly based on my observations of New Yorkers, since differences between people in say Tokyo and a Japanese small town are to me as an American much harder to see than the same kinds differences between New York and rural Pennsylvania.)

But, there's a pretty large overlap between the social skill spectra of big cities and small towns, so that even in New York, you meet plenty of socially "slow" people. It's not dramatic, but it still always surprises me to meet a social laggard in New York, just like I'm surprised when I meet someone from Mexico who doesn't like spicy food (believe it or not, there are lots of these folks too.) All that said I'm certainly not the most innately socially intelligent person, but at this point in my life I've consciously learned a lot of tricks, much like someone who works around horses learns consciously how to read them and influence them. And the sheer volume of data a big city provides teaches many of the socially slow among us (like me) how to handle people almost as well as the innately gifted types can - that's the favor that big dense cities do.

The implication is that innately gifted people have a bigger advantage in a small town than they do in a place like New York. It's also worth pointing out that lots of other cognitive characteristics likely co-vary with innate social intelligence, and this may be part of what sorts people into "big city" types and "small town" types. If you're a socially smooth person in a small town, why go to New York? You lose part of your advantage. In a small town, the socially un-gifted have no chance to catch up with you - but in a place like New York, people like me can become almost as socially clever as you, just from social "Big Data" analysis.