Love this: I'm also reminded of the research into people in America's Southern states rural communities being much quicker to anger and resort to violence than those from other places and larger cities. Some info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_Uni... It was covered in something like Freakonomics, but I can't find where.For the urban resident, the city is not so much a giant village as it is an artificial wilderness. It is a place that combines variety and opportunity with a certain degree of perennial insecurity and random danger.
It was covered in something like Freakonomics
It was in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers:
My thanks to wasoxygen too, for his characteristic diligence. As for the study, it would be laughable but for the fact that people actually take it seriously. Just consider this quotation for starters: “…They looked at the faces of their subjects, and rated how much anger they saw. They shook the young [men’s] hands to see if their grip was firmer than usual…” Ok, so they were setting out to prove a certain hypothesis about a group of people that, from the gleeful tone of the rest of text, it was obvious that they disliked – and they helped themselves to subjective assessments of their grip strength and facial expressions! Right from the outset, Cohen and Nisbett were not doing science. Basically, this sort of study is what I would characterize as a “culture trap.” One begins by picking out a certain stereotypical trait that one’s own culture finds alarming or offensive. Then one carefully crafts conditions that will bring out that trait in the target subjects but not in the control group. Imagine one wanted to make exactly the same assertion about blacks that the experimenters wanted to make about (white) southerners. It could be easily done. Just substitute the word “boy” for “asshole”. The non-black control group would simply shrug it off as odd – but one can practically guarantee the black target group wouldn’t. Presto! This would prove that blacks are hypersensitive hotheads with an excess of testosterone – right? No, quite obviously, it wouldn’t prove anything except the propaganda value of crafting a study to “prove” something that your intended audience already wants to believe. When was the last time an academic from a liberal university set out to prove something bad about blacks, gays, Hispanics, the poor, fellow liberals, or anyone else it would be embarrassing to admit had flaws? White southerners, conservatives, businessmen, and the religious are, on the other hand, fair game. And they really do display disturbing tendencies – just like any other group of human beings. Odd how they to display even more flaws, though, if you target them almost to the exclusion of other groups and help yourself to some bad methodologies. The cottage industry of pathologizing cultures that are incompatible with your own is nothing very new or very clever. People will always be grateful if you endow their pet prejudices with a certain scientific smell. If you have any doubts about this, take a trip to the Creation Museum and see for yourself. And there are always “scientists” willing to do it. See Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko.
If only we could get that "certain scientific smell" in a bottle.they helped themselves to subjective assessments
Well ... they also measured (in feet) how close the subjects got to the threat before stepping aside. But I think your point about selective testing is a valid one.
I’ve known quite a few rural southerners and Appalachians. In general, I find their culture strangely territorial but not unusually hostile. In a mixed group of people from various parts of the country, the southern is often the most relaxed person in the room. Though there is some truth to the Wikipedia article, it is painfully obvious to me that the largely rural, largely conservative south makes a convenient whipping boy for urban dwellers in the largely liberal north – a group of people they can hate without guilt, conduct bad sociological studies against, etc. The only aspect of this process that interests me is the lengths to which people (of all sorts) will go to justify their particular cultural prejudices. I will admit, of course, that the culture of the south is not purely a feature of population density -- but rural populations are hardly unique to the southern United States. One shouldn't think of "southern" and "rural" as synonyms.