This can be true I suppose, but equally I have a few friends who practically play characters as if they've resigned themselves to a role in a sitcom. For instance: one of my friends is late to just about everything and treats everyone as if we are on-call. We plainly note this repeatedly, the friend is, I hope, equally frustrated and embarrassed by it, and in spite of this nothing changes. This is obviously a critical element to their broader character.

Perhaps you mean to distinguish social groups without much intimacy? To which I'm sure we could provide some convincing cases, but this seems like a silly heuristic generally.