Briar - I'm shocked! LOL I thought you were an engineer?
Thinner wire causes more resistance than heavier wire. Or in my case twisted wires creating a heavier wire.
Think of it as a garden hose. If you pinch the hose almost off (smaller Diameter) you are restricting the flow thus creating more resistance. Electricity works the same way. The more room you give it to flow the lower the resistance.
Astrophysicist with a cosmological bent. I played with theoretical equations describing space. Empty space. Well, occasional plasma.

Definitely not an electrical engineer. Don't have an engineering bone in my body. In fact, I flunked my one and only required EE course... Just don't have a feel for these things.

Besides, I haven't worked in the field for a loooooong time. I'm an artist now. A hungry one.
I was thinking in terms of resistivity - you know, multiply resistivity by area and you get cross-section resistance, and since resistivity is a quality of materials (isn't it?), it would seem that you should get greater resistance, not smaller...
But you are right, of course, since greater cross section provides more pathways for the current to flow. That's supposed to explain it...
On the other hand, I'm still not sure why the two statements do not contradict each other. Analogies are all well and good, but: why does the hose analogy work and the friction analogy doesn't? I mean, if you have a certain coefficient of friction between two materials, if you increase the area of contact, friction increases...
On the third hand, resistance is caused by interaction of EM fields between scooting electrons and more-or-less static atoms. When you increase the cross-section, it's not like you have the same number of atoms stretched across more space - that lattice of the metal is the same across the entire cross-section. It's not at all the same as water in the pipe, where the only resistance is provided by the wall of the pipe, and if you increase the cross section of the pipe, the circumference of the cross section circle does not increase at the same rate as the cross-section of the water passing through. So what if there is a greater area available for the same number of electrons to pass through in a given period of time? The number of "resisting" atoms is the same at each path...
Well, never mind - you see the difference between a theorist and an experimentalist/engineer. I always complicate things.
