What Is American Culture? Authority, Competition, and Risk. Thursday's Edition.
What does American culture look like to others? Series 17 #4
Americans have an unusual relationship with power. They respect it when someone earns it and resent it when someone assumes it. A first-year analyst can challenge a senior vice president’s numbers in a meeting, and if the data supports the challenge, the analyst wins. Try that in Japan, South Korea, or most of Latin America, and you have not made a point; you have made an enemy.
Hofstede’s Power Distance dimension measures how much a society accepts unequal distribution of authority. The United States is a low power-distance culture, meaning Americans expect hierarchies to be functional, to help a system run smoothly; they are not about power, status, or importance. In the U.S., your title gets you a reserved parking spot, not unquestioning obedience. Employees expect to be consulted, students disagree with professors, and children argue with their parents.
In high power distance cultures, which span most of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, subordinates follow directives without debate, the teacher is always correct, and children obey. Americans think it is oppressive, and people from high power distance cultures think American informality is chaotic and disrespectful.
But here is where American culture turns contradictory. Americans flatten hierarchy while simultaneously celebrating dominance. Hofstede’s motivation towards achievement and success dimension measures whether a culture values competition or cooperation. The United States scores high on the achievement and success side. Americans reward winners visibly and publicly: employee of the month, Forbes lists, championship rings, and corner offices. Competition is the mechanism through which Americans assign value to effort. Cooperation-oriented cultures like Scandinavia, the Netherlands, or Thailand measure success through quality of life, work-life balance, and collective well-being. Americans look like they tore down the king’s throne and then immediately started a tournament to see who gets to sit in it.
This competitive instinct operates inside an environment of unusual comfort with uncertainty. Hofstede’s Uncertainty Avoidance dimension measures how threatened a culture feels by ambiguity and the unknown. Americans generally have low uncertainty avoidance. They quit stable jobs to start their own business with no guarantee of income. They move across the country for an opportunity they found online. Americans bet on their ability to adapt. They tolerate career instability and social disruption that would paralyze high uncertainty avoidance cultures like Japan, Germany, France, or much of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Those cultures build elaborate rule systems, rigid career paths, and strong institutional protections against the unknown.
These three dimensions produce a specific and recognizable pattern: authority is earned and temporary, competition determines who leads, and the rules stay loose enough that anyone can try. Americans treat this as a meritocracy. Much of the world sees a system that rewards aggressiveness, penalizes patience, and calls the outcome fair and “well deserved”.
Hornby’s archetypes map this pattern to a North + East blend. North, the power-seeker, drives competitive ambition, idea-based decision-making, and the pursuit of organizational leadership. East, the communicator, networks across hierarchies without deference, treating information and access as egalitarian. Together, they produce a type that fiercely competes but rejects the idea that a persons tilte alone deserves respect. Where the blend falls short is in uncertainty avoidance. Neither North nor East maps to ambiguity.
More on Hornby’s archetypes
This combination is the one that most visibly separates Americans from global norms. Many cultures share one or two of these traits. Very few combine all three.
Friday examines how Americans schedule time, chase fast results, and spend on pleasure.
Sidebar: Trompenaars’ Seven Cultural Dimensions
Universalism vs. Particularism (rules vs. relationships)
Individualism vs. Communitarianism (individual vs. group focus)
Neutral vs. Affective (restrained vs. expressive emotion)
Specific vs. Diffuse (separated vs. integrated life spheres)
Achievement vs. Ascription (earned vs. assigned status)
Sequential vs. Synchronic Time (linear vs. flexible time)
Internal vs. External Direction (controlling vs. adapting to an environment)
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