Any such exercise inevitably deteri

Any such exercise inevitably deteriorates into stereotyping (whether positive or negative) and should not be encouraged. Americans are humans just like everyone else, and you will find all kinds of people there, with the full range of human traits. Having lived in the US for five years myself several years ago, I can attest to this fact from first-hand experience.

Any three words that might be suggested as describing Americans could be used just as easily to describe people in any other part of the world. I do not see the value in a question of this sort, no matter how well-intentioned it might be.

To illustrate the "stereotyping effect" of this exercise, consider the words "multicultural," and "diverse," which were suggested by two of the people responding to this question. The fact is that the US is nowhere near the top of the list of the most multicultural or diverse countries in the world. Here are two excerpts from a report by the Pew Research Centre dating from 2013:


The only western country to break into the top 20 most diverse is Canada. The United States ranks near the middle, slightly more diverse than Russia but slightly less diverse than Spain.

A comparison of the Harvard and Goren maps show that the most diverse countries in the world are found in Africa. Both maps also suggest that the United States falls near the middle, while Canada and Mexico are more diverse than the US.


For the full article, see: The most (and least) culturally diverse countries in the world

Consider another word offered by another respondent: "outspoken." Anecdotal evidence suggests that Europeans (and especially Germans) are far more outspoken and straightforward than Americans and are less likely to be influenced by "political correctness" in their day-to-day speech. Americans tend to shy away from causing verbal offense precisely because of the national sensitivity regarding America's racist past originating in the era of slavery, and more recently as a result of the powerful political correctness movement, which began in the US and continues unabated to this day. Outspoken Americans (such as Ann Coulter, the ultraconservative social and political commentator and writer) are generally regarded with embarrassment and disdain by a majority of Americans.

The same critique could be made of any of the other words suggested so far by people responding to this question. People form opinions of other groups of people based on their limited experience and limited contact with those groups and with images presented in the media. There is little value in such narrow impressions, since they are taken as broad generalizations, which are often quite untrue (as demonstrated above).

It would be far more constructive to ask what values characterize the American attitude to life. The focus of such a question is the national character rather than individual Americans. The American collective psyche has certain identifiable characteristics, which may or may not be present in individual Americans. These characteristic may well be worth listing and discussing. But "three words to describe Americans" definitely is not.