New York University has advice for international students in dealing with US Americans. A handy guide is posted on their website.
Reading this makes the USA seem like a strange, exotic culture. Which I suppose it is if you weren't born and raised here. Link -via Breakfast Links
Americans generally believe the ideal person is self-reliant. Most Americans see themselves as separate individuals, not as representatives of a family, community or other group. They dislike being dependent on other people, or having others depend on them. Some people define this trait as selfishness. Others see it as a healthy freedom from the constraints of family or social class.
How is this value manifested into behavior? In individualist cultures, such as the U.S., it is assumed that people need to be alone some of the time and prefer to take care of problems by themselves. Another expectation is that people are ready to "do business" very soon after meeting, without much time spent on preliminary conversation. Also people act competitively, are proud of their accomplishments and expect others to be proud of their own accomplishments.
Reading this makes the USA seem like a strange, exotic culture. Which I suppose it is if you weren't born and raised here. Link -via Breakfast Links
First, Americans are incredibly helpful. They are so helpful that foreigners are often taken aback at the almost intrusive level of helpfulness.
Second, America is huge, and huge in a way that cannot be rightly expressed; it must be experienced. This is a huge influence on Americans culturally, technologically, and habitually.
Third, Americans are divers. So divers in fact, that it should seem silly to try to pin any behavior on "Americans" once one understands just how broad a net the term actually casts.
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Otherwise: kinda funny this was written for NYU.
I guess there are other places here you're less likely to meet an American than NYC, but not many.
Plagiarism within the University system is also a bit American... ;P
That's not selfish?
This needs to be more clear. Self is a mental concept, the way we think of ourselves as extant individual beings. But there is no self-reliant self. Show me someone who claims to be "self-reliant" and take their air-supply away. Or, take away the massive social structure within which they find themselves "self-reliant". Or, give them all of the money in the world. They will be "rich" relative to no one. Everyone else will go back to using tally-sticks, and the "rich" person's money will be worthless. Even those who appear most "self-reliant" in America are wholly dependent on "America" and constant physical laws of the universe. They are dependent on the relativistic nature of human comparitive value. They aren't self-reliant, it is all pretend.
So this could be why people from elsewhere, especially Asian countries with Daoist philosophy that emphasizes our interpdependence, have a hard time dealing with Americans. Because Americans actually believe they are self-reliant, contrary to all evidence.
Heightened relative to what, I ask? To your former self? To other selves? If to your former self, then how was the value of your former self originally determined? By comparison with other selves?
Most likely, we derive our sense of self-worth by comparison with other selves and the social ethos. Therefor to be proud is to feel somewhat elevated beyond your previous comparitively bound sense of self-worth.
All of this is necessarily selfishness, any comparison with others for worth is selfish. Thus, pride is selfish too. It can be shown that a whole slew of emotions from self-pity, to envy to anger are essentially rooted in one's comparitive self-worth. Whereas other feelings like love, are not, and are essentially the opposite; self-less.
I got to experience first the american culture, and later the British culture, and I realized where most of american behavior traits come from!
Thanks for the laugh.
You are welcome. With regards to human psychology we tend to dwell on the surface. We are unaware of the processes underpinning the most salient of our phenomenal experience. As a result, many neurotic processes dwell beneath that veil.
Quite often when we reflect on a proposition we look to our self-hood and evaluate the validity of the proposition by how it makes us feel. If the proposition induces negative feelings we engage in ratiocination for the purpose of justifying ourselves. If the proposition induces positive feelings we tend to engage in rationcination supportive of the proposition and ourselves.
Often whether the proposition induces positive or negative effects directly correlates with the intensity with we identify with the contingent domain within which the proposition pertains. For example; if you from Poland and I make the proposition "Poland's culture engenders selfish behavior." the proposition is likely to induce negative affect and trigger ratiocination for the purposes of justification (rationalization).
The above is why I make such a big deal out of contingent domains of self-worth and the functional aspects of human identity. There are experimental results which compliment this view. Too many to detail on neatorama. Instead, I'll share with you this neat-o song about Cognitive Bias
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RsbmjNLQkc
I'd prefer to keep it as free of positive-negative-affect associations (contingencies of self-worth) as possible and unfortunately the convoluted and wordy field of academic psychology is as good as it gets. In Christianity the functional aspects of identity that are contingent on comparitive domains is called the "sinful nature". Whereas in Buddhism it is referred to as the sub-human, lower realms. Both have as their aim a dissolution of the divisive mis-identification that is carried out through contingent and comparitive domains which promote an environment attractive to enmity and strife.
This principle is up-held to its most extreme in Amish cultures who bar even the slightest individualist modification to the communities' mandatory attire. Although this seems to deprive us of our "individuality" and our "freedom" it is considered to be quite the opposite. The freedom gained by the Amish way of life is the freedom-from the desire to be someone special, and not the freedom-to-be someone special as it is in contemporary American culture. In the past this has proven an effective means of mitigating culture-wide neuroses that culminate as the destruction of the society.
To some extent the founders of the United States, in particular Washington and Jefferson were wise to the sub-conscious neuroses that affect a populus within a certian culture. Of course, they had fled such a society and dreamt of starting something different, warning us repeatedly against these positive and negative-affect attachments on the individual level, the level of political parties and on the level of foreign national interests (See: George Washington's Farewell Address 1967).