You walk into a café in Tokyo, catch a stranger’s eye, and flash your warmest smile. Instead of a smile back, you get a polite but confused stare. You say sorry when you accidentally brush someone’s arm on a train in Berlin. They look at you like you’ve confessed to something. You ask a new acquaintance in Seoul how they’re doing, and they pause, really pause, like you’ve asked something deeply personal. You weren’t trying to be strange. You were just being friendly. Or at least, that’s what felt natural.
American politeness has a very specific shape. It’s warm, open, fast, and verbal. It fills the silence, closes the distance, and moves on quickly. Most Americans don’t think twice about it; these habits feel like basic decency. But step outside U.S. borders, and something unexpected happens. Behaviors that feel courteous at home start reading as odd, excessive, or even suspicious. Six of those habits, in particular, have a way of catching people off guard and not in the way Americans intend.
When Friendliness Feels Foreign
Before getting into the habits themselves, it helps to understand why the gap exists at all. American social culture rewards openness. From childhood, people learn that talking to others shows confidence and good character. Silence in shared spaces can feel heavy or even hostile. So Americans fill it with small talk, smiles, quick apologies, and cheerful greetings. These aren’t calculated moves. Their instincts are built by years of social reinforcement.
Many other cultures operate on a different set of instincts. In these places, politeness often looks like restraint. Trust builds over time, not in a 90-second conversation with a stranger. Silence isn’t a problem to fix. Privacy isn’t coldness, it’s respect. When American social habits meet those expectations, the friction that follows can be genuinely confusing for everyone involved.
1. Talking to Strangers: Friendly or Intrusive?
Americans frequently strike up a conversation with people they’ve never met. A comment in a grocery line, a quick chat on a bus, a shared remark about the weather, these feel like small courtesies. Psychologist David Webb describes small talk as something that helps us coordinate, build rapport, and navigate low-stakes exchanges that smooth the edges of daily life. Americans aren’t always looking to make friends. They’re just softening the edges of shared space.
Abroad, that habit often lands differently. In Sweden, uninvited small talk is considered so uncomfortable that it has its own name, kallprat, meaning “cold talk,” or dödprat, meaning “dead talk.” In many cultures across Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, striking up a conversation with a stranger without a clear reason raises an immediate question: What does this person want?
In societies where privacy carries real social weight, conversation between strangers is typically reserved for a specific purpose. Without one, a chatty American can seem less like a friendly person and more like someone with an agenda, even if that agenda is nothing more than filling a quiet elevator ride.
2. Tipping: A Kindness That Can Actually Offend
Few American customs confuse international visitors quite like tipping culture. In the U.S., tipping isn’t optional in any meaningful social sense. Service workers often depend on tips to supplement wages that don’t cover a living by themselves. Leaving nothing or leaving little feels less like a neutral choice and more like a moral failure. Americans grow up absorbing the idea that how you tip says something about who you are as a person. Outside America, that logic doesn’t translate.
In many countries, service workers earn stable wages, and a tip isn’t expected or needed. In Japan and South Korea, tipping can cross into offensive territory. Rather than feeling appreciated, a worker who receives a tip may feel the customer is implying their employer underpays them, or worse, that they need charity. What Americans mean by generosity is an awkward misreading of the situation.
Tipping culture is genuinely strange when seen from the outside, and most Americans never stop to consider how charged and unusual the entire system actually is.
3. Smiling at Everyone: Warm or Just Weird?
American smiling is automatic. It doesn’t always mean happiness. Most of the time, it means “I’m not a threat” or “everything is fine here.” Customer service culture has drilled this reflex so deeply that Americans smile through frustration, stress, and boredom without realizing they’re doing it.
In many other cultures, a smile is something that happens naturally when there’s a reason. With close friends. During a moment of real joy. Not at a stranger on a sidewalk who has no idea who you are.
A writer once recalled sitting on a bench at her university when an international student approached and, after a brief introduction, asked one question: “Why are you smiling?” It stopped her cold. She’d never considered it. Smiling just felt right.
But from the outside, an unexplained smile from a stranger can read as artificial, unsettling, or even slightly unhinged. In cultures where emotional expressions carry weight precisely because they’re used carefully, a person grinning at nothing in particular doesn’t signal warmth. It signals something harder to name and not in a good way.
4. Saying Sorry for Everything: Polite or Anxious?
Ask someone from another country what they notice most about American conversation, and “sorry” comes up often. Americans apologize for interrupting, for asking questions, for bumping into someone, for taking up space. Half the time, the word leaves their mouth before they’ve even processed whether they’ve done anything wrong.
Psychologist and professor Gregory Chasson has a term for this pattern. He calls it the “anxious sorry,” a safety behavior that offers short-term relief from social discomfort. Saying sorry preemptively smooths things over, signals good intent, and sidesteps potential conflict. In busy American environments, it works.
Abroad, it doesn’t read the same way. In many countries, an apology is something reserved for genuine fault. Saying sorry carries weight. When someone apologizes constantly for nothing, it creates confusion about what they did they do? Why are they taking the blame? In some cases, the habit reads as emotional insecurity rather than politeness. In others, it just sounds fake.
Americans often don’t realize that what feels like social grace at home can come across as performative overcompensation somewhere else.
5. “How Are You?” A Question That Expects No Answer
Few phrases sum up the gap between American and international social norms better than this one. “How are you?” gets said dozens of times a day in the U.S. at the start of emails, when passing coworkers in hallways, and when approaching a store clerk. Almost no one expects an honest answer. “Fine,” “good,” or “can’t complain” closes the loop, and everyone moves on.
It functions more as a social signal than a real question. A way of saying: I see you, I’m not hostile, let’s get on with things. In Germany, that same question lands completely differently. Asking “how are you” is considered a personal inquiry, one that invites a real response. Answering with a cheerful “I’m fine!” reads as shallow, naive, or dishonest. Germans have noted that in their culture, the question is almost a trick because an honest answer would rarely be so simple.
Across much of the world, asking someone how they are implies you’re prepared to hear the truth. When Americans ask it without that preparation or without any real interest in the answer, it can feel like a performance of connection rather than actual connection. Friendly on the surface, hollow underneath.
6. Getting Close: Warmth or a Boundary Violation?
American social culture tends to flatten hierarchy and close physical distance. A hug between colleagues who barely know each other, a light touch on the arm during conversation, standing closer than might feel comfortable, these are read as signs of warmth and informality. Americans use physical proximity to communicate trust and ease.
In many other cultures, personal space is carefully protected. Physical contact belongs in close relationships, not in professional settings or casual acquaintances. An unexpected touch, however well-meaning, can feel invasive. Not rude in an aggressive sense, but a quiet crossing of an invisible line that the other person takes seriously.
What feels like openness on one side of the exchange can feel like a violation on the other. Same gesture, completely different experience.
What’s Really Going On Here
None of these habits makes Americans rude. They make Americans American, shaped by a specific cultural history that values openness, informality, and verbal ease. American politeness isn’t wrong. It’s just local, even when it doesn’t feel that way.
Cultures build their social rules around what they need to function. Their history, their economy, and their values around privacy and trust. In some places, silence builds connection. In others, small talk does. Neither approach is more evolved or more decent than the other. They’re just different languages spoken by people who don’t realize they’re speaking at all.
Awareness of these differences doesn’t just prevent awkward moments abroad. It opens something more useful: the ability to step back, watch how others navigate social space, and let a different culture set the rhythm for once. Sometimes, the most respectful thing a person can do in an unfamiliar place is put their instincts aside, pay attention, and follow someone else’s lead.
