200 Years of Books Prove That City-Living Changes Our Psychology

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/08/200-years-books-prove-city-living-changes-our-psychology/6505/




UCLA researcher Patricia Greenfield has long suspected that the environment around us influences our psychology – not in the classic sense that our family life or peer groups sway our behavior, but in a much broader way. Human psychology adapts differently, she theorized, to rural settings than to urban ones.

Rural living, with its subsistence economies, simpler technologies, and close-knit communities, demands of people a greater sense of deference to authority and duty to each other. Urbanization, on the other hand, generally comes with greater wealth and education, and complex technology and commerce. Adapt to life in a city, and a different set of values becomes more important: for starters, personal choice, property accumulation, and materialism.

"When you have greater wealth, you have more choices," Greenfield says. When you live in a city, there are simply more paths to chose, more things to do, more ways you might spend your money. Greater education brings choice, too. In this way, personal choice – and an emphasis on the individual – becomes more central in an urban world to our values, our behavior, and our culture.

This implies that as a society slowly urbanizes over time, its psychology and culture change, too. But Greenfield hasn't been able to prove that until now. In her latest research, published in the journal Psychological Science, she leverages an enormous quantifiable dataset on American culture over the last two centuries that never existed before: the Google Books Ngram Viewer.

[Fumesucker]

1. It's formal organization in cities vs more informal organization in rural areas

In cities you are dealing more with people you don't know during your day so you need more formal organization, in the rural area you tend to be dealing with people you know or are even related to during your day, formal organization not nearly as necessary.

Informal groups can be and often are even more harsh and judgmental socially than formal ones. Social cohesiveness is great if you happen to fit into the social unit, if not then you're out of luck.

In cities there tend to be more and more varied social units where those who don't fit in one social milieu have the option of seeking different experiences.

[Igel]

2. With the usual business about authority.

Cities require more formal organization, more rules, more laws. Therefore they require less deference to authority?

In rural areas you are more independent, know people can't help you as much if you get into trouble, and rely on local networks. And that's greater deference to authority?

Have to wonder what "authority" means and if it's not a rural/urban split but a consequence of America's primarily being rural generations ago. "Authority" then meant more "this is how things have to be" and the rules were internalized, as opposed to having people telling you want to do and ultimately your having to do them.

Your point about cohesiveness, however, is dead on. With the caveat that even in cities, the social groups are pretty judgmental. It's only that cities can easily fragment into lots of subgroups and be much less cohesive that people can get along in them. It's why a lot of city-folk have trouble moving to the suburbs, esp. the teens. Suddenly they have a limited choice of social networks and not only find that they need to fit in, but they need to be tolerant (esp. since they often consider themselves superior).

[JimDandy]

3. K&R for more exposure. n/t