So, understand that the things I'm about to mention are not universally true for all Americans, obviously. For any feature, there's a statistical distribution over the population of individuals. I'm not saying that "All Americans are more X than all Europeans". I'm saying that "The average American is more X than the average European, even if that difference is dwarfed by the standard deviation within which each of those populations".
Here's some that come to mind:
1- positivity. Americans seem to have more of a can do attitude, Europeans start out with the negative belief that attempts will fail and things don't change.
2- friendliness. I lived 1 year in Chicago and in that one year I was approached on the street 3 times by random people who just said "hi, how are you doing? Nice day". In the 10 years I lived in London that happened exactly zero times.
3- shared identity. In Europe there's endless "cultural bickering" between neighboring countries over their miniscule, irrelevant differences. I don't perceive this across American states. The one thing that all Europeans agree on is that we're happy we're not American. How pathetic is that.
4- emphasis of freedom and free speech.
5- work culture (partially). I'm not going to say that I want Europe to emulate American work culture whole sale, because in America there's more abuse from employers and that's a negative aspect. At the same time, one thing I think is great is that in the US it seems that some significant fraction of people actually believe in the jobs they do. In Europe people say that, but we all know it's fake, we're just here for the paycheck. This might just be American positivity spilling into work life.
These are all things I've heard Europeans explicitly point to as undesirable:
1- American positivity is fake
2- American friendliness is fake
3- American shared identity is actually lack of identity
4- The concept of Freedom is American propaganda
5- enjoying your job is Stockholm syndrome from being abused by your employer.
I appreciate this response, it actually matches some things I've heard from European coworkers regarding Americans being more positive and friendly. I also think you did a great job capturing the fact there's honest and dishonest versions of these qualities and both can be true depending on the circumstance. Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
So, understand that the things I'm about to mention are not universally true for all Americans, obviously. For any feature, there's a statistical distribution over the population of individuals. I'm not saying that "All Americans are more X than all Europeans". I'm saying that "The average American is more X than the average European, even if that difference is dwarfed by the standard deviation within which each of those populations".
Here's some that come to mind:
1- positivity. Americans seem to have more of a can do attitude, Europeans start out with the negative belief that attempts will fail and things don't change.
2- friendliness. I lived 1 year in Chicago and in that one year I was approached on the street 3 times by random people who just said "hi, how are you doing? Nice day". In the 10 years I lived in London that happened exactly zero times.
3- shared identity. In Europe there's endless "cultural bickering" between neighboring countries over their miniscule, irrelevant differences. I don't perceive this across American states. The one thing that all Europeans agree on is that we're happy we're not American. How pathetic is that.
4- emphasis of freedom and free speech.
5- work culture (partially). I'm not going to say that I want Europe to emulate American work culture whole sale, because in America there's more abuse from employers and that's a negative aspect. At the same time, one thing I think is great is that in the US it seems that some significant fraction of people actually believe in the jobs they do. In Europe people say that, but we all know it's fake, we're just here for the paycheck. This might just be American positivity spilling into work life.
These are all things I've heard Europeans explicitly point to as undesirable:
1- American positivity is fake
2- American friendliness is fake
3- American shared identity is actually lack of identity
4- The concept of Freedom is American propaganda
5- enjoying your job is Stockholm syndrome from being abused by your employer.