How Are We Alike? How are We Different?

A Portrait of Human Character

Decades ago, when I was hopping from continent to continent as an international marketing executive for a large electronics manufacturer, I developed a model of human character or personality, a portrait, if you will, specifying how we are similar and how we differ. Essentially, it went like this: 70% of who we are is shared among all people, 25% is cultural, and 5% is individual. A graphic of it would look like this:

In the current era, scientists compare how close homo sapiens’ genes are to, for example, those of chimpanzees (96%), cats (90%), or bananas (50%). This is not that. This is a heuristic model of personality and behavior — soft science, at best. It was a designed to help me predict how different people would react in various circumstances around the world.

What it didn’t take into account was how each nation feels about itself. At the time, I presumed that Americans would think their own individual component was much higher than 5% — more like 75% — because of a belief in what is now called American exceptionalism. I wasn’t fooled in the least by that. Moving constantly from country to country, it was clear to me that Americans were more conformist than other cultures, where, in some cases, actual individualism was flourishing. One had only to observe café life in…