"'Secondary relationships,' the nemesis of early psychologists, suddenly ceased to be destructive. Impersonality no longer led to disintegration of rural mores but to increased freedom for individuals to choose the roles they wished to play. 'Since the major portion of social contacts in the city are of the touch-and-go type, external appearance assumes a pronounced social value,' they [Gist and Halbert, in Urban Society, 1933] concluded; 'because of the exaggerated emphasis on external form, many urban persons live behind a mask that conceals the real self.' City dwellers learned to express their personalities by closely adhering to conventions and customs symbolic of their attitudes to life.
As Gist and Halbert concluded:
"This masquerading, posing, playing a role, gives the outward impression of hypocrisy, and to the rural person, who deliberately avoids artificiality and who cannot understand the basis of urban relationships, the metropolite is hypocritical, untrustworthy, a 'slicker.' Yet withal it is a natural phenomena, a form of social adjustment that has grown out of the exigencies of urban life.'"
-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 187.
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