Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.

This month we are revisiting our series from last year about what makes America so American.

Today, the pros and cons of America's extreme individualism.

Hope you enjoy.

In our previous episode, we made what may sound like a bold claim.

We said that a lot of good ideas and policies that work elsewhere in the world can't work

in the US because our culture is just different.

Not necessarily better or worse, but very different.

That was our hypothesis, at least, and we did find a number of learned people who had

data to back up the hypothesis.

The people that came to New York early on, and they were from also to different cultural

backgrounds, and that's helped produce the looseness that exists to this day.

The Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective.

In society that are tighter, people are willing to call out rule violators.

Here in the US, it's actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms.

You want to be the same self, regardless of who you're talking to or what context you're

in.

In other places, they don't think it's a smart idea to be consistent.

Some of the measurable differences were a bit odd.

Apparently, over 50% of cats and dogs in the US are obese.

The focus of that episode was American culture, and how are we defining culture?

None of it is intentional.

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