I was in St. Louis last week giving a presentation, and in chatting with people beforehand, I quickly became acquainted with a common social pattern – being asked where you went to high school.  The group laughed about it when I brought it up, and it is an odd sort of commonality.  I was struck later that day when a colleague who grew up in St. Louis e-mailed me and asked if I’d figured out ‘where I went to school’ yet, and later in the weekend when I happened to share with a friend my recent trip, and she alluded to the same question.

All locales have their own ‘thing’. In Colorado we like to ask people ‘what do you do’ – not meaning what’s your job, but do you snowboard or ski?  Hike or run? Mountain bike or road bike? In Delaware it is common to ask ‘where do you work’ – the answer generally being for a bank or for a chemical company.

We all like to put people into categories, using our mental models to make deeply held assumptions about people based on these small facts about their background. These aren’t necessarily casual ice-breakers, they are helping us put people into boxes that may or may not be accurate.  The next time you hear yourself asking something like that, challenge your own assumptions about what the response means. It might be accurate but…. it might not.