From the humble beginning of civilizations to the flourishing of digital information, human has formed the most complex, interactive, and ever-changing societies ever created on earth. Throughout the process of their establishment, different geographical properties of the origins and historical evolutions created different social structures with unique characteristics. For sociologists, identifying the most critical characteristics of which is intriguing yet challenging due to the subjective nature of the topic.

Large gatherings of people from similar backgrounds formed the major cities. Based on this, one may state that they must be studied to interpret the essential characteristics. The statement links the primary cities and the decisive attribute of the community, which is falsehood and has several logical flaws. Studying the major cities may not only keep the essence away but could mislead to totally different conclusions.

One obvious reason for the major cities’ failure to exhibit the characteristics is the cultural influence of one other. Every year hundreds of “Anime”—Japanese cartoon pouring into the western world, creating very untraditional cultural phenomena like annual Japanese comic cons and integrated Japanese style English on lots of online forums. A sociologist who knows little about western culture may look at the crowds on comic cons and assume that most people have similar values as Japan here since major cities have a great number of anime lovers. But this assumption is false since it only represents a few participants. In the majority of less populated areas, Japanese-related events are much less common, and the traditional European characteristics are much more well preserved and exhibited.

The incident also leads to another factor that people’s behavior in large cities does not always display the core values of a society. America has numerous infamous scandals about discrimination against some races. This “melting pot” absorbs immigrants from other nations and has very few native residents. Most migrants are active in the main cities, where most hate crimes happen. Taking the epidemic of COVID-19, Asians are facing severe violent behaviors in the major cities by the news. The facts seem to lead to the conclusion that America is hostile and the defining characteristics of which is “hate”. This is far from the truth if we look at the overall peaceful territory, where lots of different races get along.

When we try to study the collective behavior of a group, a representative specimen has to be selected. Major cities cannot always be a subject sample to reflect a collective value. Depending on situations, not studying major cities can contribute to the study of the most vital characteristics of a society.