l4v.r0v 
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@Kretoma: If you begin with that description of Americans as you analyze any Americans you interact with, you'll find plenty of things that appear to confirm it. For example, American tourists are loud (that's assertive, right?) and certainly our political rhetoric lends credence to claims about fatalism, materialism, Puritanism, effort-optimism, and individualism.
However, keep in mind that cultural identities- while often predictive and perhaps useful- are narratives that we construct about ourselves and about other groups of people. These narratives might appear to be useful, but they also exploit well-known failure modes of human intelligence. In the long run, they might make for okay memes (or EU4/diplomacy roleplay behaviors) but- as any historian would know- it'll also be easy to find plenty of people who just don't fit into the character we project onto entire societies.
The average American can perhaps be modeled as a weighted linear combination of some of these traits as well as other ones that are not mentioned in the article (with a relatively high degree of variance between individuals). However, human brains are not great at interpreting objects or concepts as linear combinations (e.g., consider your next meal- if there's a 90% chance that it'll have meat and a 10% chance it won't, can you really, meaningfully visualize the concept of a 90% chance of having meat? Odds are your mental picture would tend toward the meal just having meat, maybe 90% of a steak instead of 100%- but you're not intrinsically equipped to handle probabilities and randomness.) Furthermore, human brains tend to overestimate how well we understand the world around us- we like to fit things to stories and then employ those simple narratives to generate future predictions (in a casual, rather than probabilistic manner).
In other words, not all of your linked article is noise but it also actually tells you much less than you will think it does. Even with all the differences we're able to pick out between cultures (our brains are very well-equipped to identify things like that but also tend toward giving them too much weight), I'd be willing to wager that- at least within Western societies- there is far more variation within cultures than between cultures when it comes to beliefs, ideologies, and behavioral patterns. American culture is really not all that distanced from German, British, or even Spanish culture- we're just good at tricking ourselves into building stories that allow for cleaner separations of these societies than actually exists in reality.
It also doesn't help that political, social, and cultural rhetoric amplifies these apparent differentiators between societies as identity markers (e.g., "Americans are individualistic, Europeans less so"- when in reality it's just that, on average, Americans are more individualistic- you can easily find an European who's more individualistic than most Americans, or an American who's less individualistic than most Europeans).
Be careful with generalizations. Make sure they're well-supported- and that means doing more than just a face validity analysis or asking other people to perform one. The bar for taking them seriously should be high, because generalizations and stories are very good at taking advantage of your brain's worst limitations. You've probably already met a whole lot of people in your own society that would fit right in in most American neighborhoods. They might get a gun and a pick-up truck (or not- not everyone has a gun or a pick-up truck, and the more complex your stereotype the fewer the people there will be that fit it) but on the whole- as individuals- you can no longer lump us together than you can everyone you've ever met in your own life.
Edited 11/3/2018 00:32:25
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