I was reading a pretty interesting article in the economist subtitled [Not so special friends](http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm? story_id=10927596) where they commissioned a poll regarding American and British attitudes to certain topics. And they did find some serious differences (easily readable graphs here) particularly over religion.
Over 80% of people in America believe there is a God (I think they left out the unsure’s/maybe’s as the numbers don’t add up to 100%) which is double that of the UK’s. Over 60% of Brit’s would be indifferent to an atheist Prime Minister whereas around 45% of Americans would be sorry or angry.
I do wonder what they mean by sorry though.
Similarly the data on Values and Ideology also show wide differences - it looks like us Brits are much more sympathetic to the poor then you guys are as twice as many of us think they should have taxes reduced compared to middle income or better off groups and we’re also far more in favour of the Govt. looking after the unemployed.
I do see some possible flaws in this survey though as you could get vastly different results say if you split the US into the costs and the midlands or even between the north and south England. However as a national average it looks pretty interesting.
One thing about Brits is they don’t know how to post links that work. Try this one.
My recently-arrived American coworker told me she is having trouble adapting to the UK business environment. In particular, she feels she has upset quite a few people with her brutal honesty.
She drew a diagram:
US: Good Bad
Honesty Politeness
UK: Bad Good
Honesty Politeness
In an attempt to bridge the gap, I amended this to:
Bluntness **Tact** Politeness
Also, she said she’s freaked out that people at work are actually friends, and is having problems reconciling this. Might not be indicative - could be just her - but when I worked in the US I was surprised (and disappointed) by the lack of socialising outside the office.
The other thing, when I worked in the US, was that I went down a storm because I constantly put my neck on the line with big decisions, compared to my fellow managers. The reason was, I came to realise, because I wasn’t scared of being fired, because of our pansy-ass Euro labor law (even though I was in the US and could have been fired).
Maybe this is a hijack, but is she from New York? I’ve found that the business culture in New York is a lot more antagonistic than it is here in Boston.
We have a tendency to understate stuff here and value ‘politeness’. I have to catch myself when I am stating Minnesotisms like “That will be difficult” when I mean “Are you freakin crazy?!?! That will take way too long and be much too expensive”.
For what it’s worth, this surprised my American sister-in-law as well, when she accepted a contract to work in the UK for a year. On her return, SIL reported just about the same thing as your colleague. It was the socializing outside the office that surprised and bothered SIL most–apparently, her co-workers in the UK spent (according to SIL) much time together outside of work at the pub, or at least engaged in activities that began and/or ended in a pub. While SIL is not the sort who has any problems with the existence of pubs and alcohol, she was plainly bothered by the friendship and togetherness outside of work that usually involved drinking at some point.
I saw these graphs the other day. Whilst some indicate significant differences between the attitudes of the two nations, it seems that some are also quite surprisingly similar.
Look at the graphs for climate change and immigration, for instance.
Yes they have different in views of religion and God & the place of this in public policy and any question that you throw God into huge chunks of Americans and British people clearly are going to disagree by double digit percentages.
On the other hand they are surprisingly close on the Death Penalty, Best way to get job Creation, big parts of cutting taxes (on the everyone and the better off) - and most surprisingly on the withdrawal of troops in Iraq … there is a perception, at least with me, that that would be wildly different between the countries.
The bit I find most interesting is the graph of political parties’ opinions.
Every opinion trends towards the “left” for UK parties. The UK Tories are to the right of most of the Democrats, but nowhere near the Republicans. And the spread of political direction is way, way larger in the US - the UK parties are much closer together. And as an aside, the Lib-Dems have entirely swapped places with Labour, too.
I suspect the issue of the NHS has a great bearing on this, as few Tories seek to dismantle it, even if they secretly wish they could - e.g. Thatcher.
It is a function of this board largely, and partially what the MSM has lead us to believe. it is the* slightest bit surprising *, to me that a tiny greater percentage of Americans than British wanted to withdraw the troops now, and withdraw by the end of 2008 and there was little real difference between America and Britain among those who want to wait to withdraw until Iraq was secure and set a date for withdrawal in 2009-10 I was “slightest bit surprised” by that.
Well, that one could be due to a perception, accurate or not, that the poor already don’t pay much tax and so to there’s no call to reduce their taxes.
I wonder if there’s a difference between Brits and Americans in how they define “poor” and “middle-class” and which group a person is more likely to identify with.
One difference that doesn’t surprise me is that Americans tend to be more individualistic, believing that people should look out for themselves and the government should butt out (comparatively speaking).
Among those who think the government should be doing less for the poor and unemployed, you’ll find those who don’t care about the poor and unemployed as well as those who do care but believe it’s up to private organizations and individuals to help them (and who put their money where their mouths are—I recently read a column by George Will claiming that conservatives (in America) give more to charity than liberals.
That is interesting- though I doubt any sane Tory would advocate the end of a free at the point of use health service if they ever wanted to get elected. And also the Tories would prefer Obama over McCain, even they think the Republicans are a bit too right wing
The graphs for climate change are funny- we all seem to be against it, but we don’t actually want to do anything!
Actually, I found just the opposite. New Yorkers were more friendly but also more direct. It would not be unusual for someone in my old NYC office to say something like: “ya bustin my bawls he’ya”. But I got a lot of cooperation and what sounded harsh was actually just up-front honesty. It was quite different from someone from Georgia who was brought up in a more genteel manner.
But to the question, I’ve always thought Americans were highly British-centric in language, custom, laws, work ethic, etc… Canada, Australia, New Zealand all share a very similar background. Certainly time has created uniqueness to each country but you could transfer between any of them and eventually fit in.
as twice as many of us think they should have taxes reduced compared to middle income or better off groups and we’re also far more in favour of the Govt. looking after the unemployed.
