Is it common in the US to be dishonestly nice to other people? Eg being positive and friendly toward them while waiting to stab them in the back.
This theme is something I've picked up on earlier. Another example: some Americans mentioned the lack of smiles from waiters in Europe as problematic, thinking it was rude.
Personally, I prefer living in a culture where people are honest assholes and only smile at you if they actually like you.
I just moved to Sweden and immediately noticed the lack of "dishonestly niceness" that I took for granted in the US. It's quite refreshing actually and communication is more efficient.
Edit: In a US workplace you can't tell someone directly "that's wrong" or "I don't like that". You have to politely get to the point in an indirect fashion so as not to offend. It's an especially acute problem when giving that kind of feedback to superiors or other people in power.
> In a US workplace you can't tell someone directly "that's wrong" or "I don't like that".
I know this varies to some degree with region, but if you're working tech in Silicon Valley and not saying "that's wrong", you're just not doing your job.
I think it's common to be friendly or nice rather than being neutral especially regarding something you know someone has worked on. I don't think this means people are 'waiting to stab them in the back', but simply that the default state is to be friendlier.
As far as the service industry goes (which I think is different), if you're working as a waiter and you're unfriendly to the person, take forever, mess up the order, and ignore their requests (which was my friend's experience in France) then I think you're mostly not doing a good job and I think most people would think they were rude.
It's very common to be willfully (as opposed to reflexively, as you would with a friend) nice in the US, though it depends a lot on the context and region.
I grew up in the upper midwest, and the politeness there is almost pathological. It seems to be mostly conflict avoidance. In California, I've seen more people wanting to paint everything a peachier shade than reality might otherwise indicate, due to optimism. In NYC, friendliness without cause is commonly looked at with suspicion, and there's a tendency to treat it like the 'grinfucking' in Suster's original article.
So, you might get the best feedback in NY (assuming someone doesn't have reason to exploit you). In terms of quality of life, I think there's a lot to be said for the California approach, which is why I live here and (in my opinion) why the bay area has a better culture of innovation. For the purposes of this article, the Midwest 'just trying to be nice' mentality is pretty ubiquitous (though more glaringly obvious there), and well worth being aware of.
Having lived in the US and being Dutch, I know that it is partly a cultural thing. Dutch people are much more blatantly honest, while Americans definately love to sugar coat. How many ask "How are you doing?" but then proceed to ignore the answer?
That being said, we get a lot of feedback but I admit I as developer talk to too few customers to get a big picture. I'm sure I could get honest feedback from them however.
It's cultural, yes, but this particular example isn't necessarily emblematic. In American english, "How are you?" isn't a literal question, it's a conventional greeting. The answer is expected to be "Not bad" or "Fine" or "Well" -- not because of a desire to sugarcoat everything, but simply because it functions linguistically as a start-of-conversation marker or just a standalone greeting. People are thrown off when someone responds immediately with an honest, in-depth answer about how their life is. It's like pinging a server and getting back a process list. Unfortunately it happens to be that our implementation of certain conversation protocols is slightly different in mutually confusing ways :) <-- sugarcoating
Most languages have their own version of adjacent question/answer pairs that don't really function as literal questions. Searching for "have you eaten yet?" will pull up lots of interesting examples.
This theme is something I've picked up on earlier. Another example: some Americans mentioned the lack of smiles from waiters in Europe as problematic, thinking it was rude.
Personally, I prefer living in a culture where people are honest assholes and only smile at you if they actually like you.