URBANISM AND THE SOCIABILITY OF COMMERCIAL EXCHANGE

It was predicted from Milgram's overload hypothesis that more urban locations are busier, and that interactions in busier locations are less sociable and shorter in duration. Eight locations ranging from rural to urban were chosen in and around Philadelphia. In each location, interactions were observed in both a post office and a delicatessen during an hour in the morning and an hour at noontime on two weekdays in the summer of 1979 and on one weekday in the summer of 1980. Observers recorded the friendliness of greeting, conversation, facial regard, smiles, farewell, and overall tone of both clerk and customer in an interaction, as well as the duration of the interaction, the number of customer companions, and the number of people waiting to be served (a measure of busyness).; The sociability of an entire interaction was measured as the mean of the 12 clerk-customer interaction measures, and this sociability scale was found to be highly homogenous (Cronbach's alpha for the 12 items was .92). Locations were then characterized by the average sociability of their interactions, and these mean sociabilities were found to have satisfactory test-retest reliability over days (.85) and years (.78).; In a correlational analysis of location means, more urban locations were less sociable and busier, and interactions in less sociable locations were shorter. But busier locations were not less sociable, and interactions in busier and in more urban locations were not shorter. These results suggest independent effects of urbanism on busyness and on sociability, and raise a question about the time course over which effects of social over-stimulation must be integrated in order to affect behavior. A multiple regression analysis indicated that urbanism of location predicted less than three percent of the variance of individual sociability scores. The small size of the effect cautions against exaggerating the impact of urbanism on the sociability of the individual interactions which comprise commercial exchange.