Are there any misconceptions or stereotypes about Americans that you'd like to debunk?
Are there any misconceptions or stereotypes about Americans that you'd like to debunk?
There are a lot of stereotypes about Americans, some very true, some very false. Curious about thoughts from other Americans
I'll start with one. I've frequently run across the notion that American friendliness must be "fake." I'm sure that happens, but I find that it's more about being raised with a different standard for the baseline of a social interaction, and particularly of the acceptable ceiling. An English person and an American could each have roughly the same emotional response to a stranger, but the American will have been socialized that the proper way (or at least a proper way) to express a sort of general appreciation of another's humanity is to make them feel welcome and seen, by engaging in conversation, where our equally good-natured English friend will have been told that it's more polite and respectful to give the other person space to get on with their day. It's true that the American, despite in engaging in behavior that would seem to imply otherwise, doesn't really want to be your best friend any more than the English person (though they might... America is an extrovert's dream), but neither are they being fake. There is simply a different set of cultural expectations.
Never thought about this, but it's quite true. You are very right that the average American is generally pretty friendly and helpful, some may say overly friendly, but yea, it's not fake, it's just our standard haha. This is a great answer!
I'm not sure I follow this answer. Distilled into a nutshell it reads:
Sure, none of the behaviour is real, but it's cultural so it's not fake.
Do the words "real" and "fake" have different definitions in the USA as well?
The fact that it's cultural to display fake friendly behaviour doesn't stop it from being fake in my books. It just explains why the fake exists.
Ive traveled around this country a lot and I'll say that America is a huge collection of different cultures with long histories.
One thing we get a lot from the rest of the world is "America is such a new nation and doesn't have a cultural history." Which is completely untrue. In fact America is older than most modern nations.
Each state I've been to has some really unique cultural aspects to it and when you spend enough time there you realize that people from bordering states can be just as different as people from bordering European countries.