The French Are Not Rude

There seems to be a stereotype that the French are rude.  Personally I have absolutely no idea where this has come from as in my experience French people are anything but.  They can be rather to the point at times, I could maybe see that being misconstrued as rudeness.  I know that Germans are also sometimes considered rude especially by people from the UK or the USA namely due to the severe lack of 'small talk' in their mannerisms.

On the French, I have met nothing but polite and considerate French people.  Even travelling on the Metro, people allow passengers off the trains before boarding and they even say "excusez-moi", "merci" and "pardon" - something which, for someone who has lived in London is quite bizarre.  The London Underground is akin to a cell in Azkaban, filled with a soul-sucking silence and cold connection-less inhabitants.

I'm sure not everyone in London is really like that either though.  Having lived there I did meet a few people during my time who were very outgoing and tried to break away from this normality.  All of these are just Stereotypes though.  There are many that float around, Asians are good at Maths, Irish and Scottish people are alcoholics, Scottish people will eat anything if it's deep fried in batter, Black guys are well-endowed and so on and so forth. 

You have to ask yourself though, where do Stereotypes come from?  In Psychology, stereotypes can be explained as self-perpetuating through conformity.  The theory of conformity states that individuals when placed in a larger common group will take on the characteristics of that group in order to conform - even if it means denying their own individual desires [this oppression of our own desires is known as deindividuation].  In this context a Stereotype becomes an expected behaviour of a group, and so long as members of that group are seen to be conforming to that expectation and those who don't are not highly visible, then the group as a while will behave in that manner.

In my personal experience I can cite at least one very prominent memory of seeing this process take place.  While working in a shop with a team of around 72 people, a new member of staff joined.  He was bright, highly motivated and wanted to motivate others.  He tried his best to change the way people in the shop had come to think of their work as mundane but eventually his personality broke down and he accepted the "norm" of the shop and 'slowed down' to the pace that everyone else had been working.  You can try and argue who was right in this scenario, who would be the better example but it doesn't matter really.  The only thing that matters is what the majority of the group and more importantly, the most highly visible section of the group had been behaving.

The point of visibility is imperative to understand.  No more so than on the Internet can we demonstrate this importance - in new and emerging technologies and in new enterprises online.  Take Facebook for example.  Facebook rose to its success because the most visible group, of early adopters and students where the first groups to embrace the technology.  Google+ continued this trend knowing full-well that at the beginning, the public at large is not the intended audience.  If you want to control the sheep, you take the Shepherds first - they are different, they are more visible and ultimately their example is the example the flock will follow.

So let's see how people identify themselves.  Are you a follower or a leader?