I'm amazed this was actually published.
Western exceptionalism is confirmed to be
an actual mental disease, now backed up by a peer-reviewed study produced by one of the world's most respected experimental neurology journals:
People in the U.S. Think They Are Better Than They Actually Are.
Western individualism may promote a “better than you actually are” mindset
Specifically, we looked at the magnitude of the “alpha wave”—a pattern of activity that appears when a person’s mind wanders and engages in internally directed thoughts. We observed the alpha effect when Americans thought about themselves within a fraction of a second after learning that something good happened to them. This early attention predicted the magnitude of Americans' "positive illusions"— a cognitive bias that makes you feel more competent, more blessed, more fortunate and better than you actually are.
Taiwanese participants did not show this pattern when thinking about either success or failure happening to the self, nor did they show evidence of holding positive illusions, as mentioned above.
Some Western psychologists have tried to explain the absence of positive illusions by arguing that "East Asians disguise their true feelings" to avoid appearing too self-focused, under the racial stereotype that East Asians value and act under "false modesty". But
our data show that this explanation is inaccurate. We saw no added brain activity, for instance, that would correlate with effortful concealment of one’s true feelings among the Taiwanese people who participated in our study.
Westerners take an additional step to boost their good feeling when something good happens to them.
Westerners spontaneously maximize good feelings about the self through an automatic neural response. It occurs within a fraction of a second, without apparent effort, let alone any deliberation or conscious strategizing.
Such a response might seem "natural" and "inevitable", but it is not. Instead the response is cultural, having formed through years of socialization. The brain is
to produce this response because it supports attitudes that help a person fit into their individualistic culture, valuing self-promotion and initiative.
East Asians show no such spontaneous or automatic response. They would seem to be more accepting of various events as those events happen to them. Other work we have done has found that
while self-esteem predicts health in the West, it does in East Asian societies.
In many cultures outside the West, people regard their selves as interdependent and embedded in social relationships. They feel protected and secure when connected to a larger social community. From that cultural perspective, there is no need to feel particularly good about one’s independent, individual self.
From the Western perspective, East Asians might appear excessively polite in their attention to social ties or could seem disengaged or even depressed or maladjusted in their ambivalence toward self-promotion and initiative.
Our data, however, show that East Asians respond to events naturally and realistically, without extra thought. From the East Asian perspective,
the Western tendency to boast good feelings about oneself could come across as
futile, unnecessary or even childish because it shows how the person is failing to appreciate the relational nature of the self.
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