People are alike but culture matters

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, concerning the differences in audience participation in the television programs in the format of "So you want to be a millionaire". The program allows contestants, who are competing for very large prizes, to poll the audience for the answer of one question during the quiz. According to the story:

• In the United States, audiences try to help with each member giving his/her best guess as to the correct answer;
• In France the audience would try to help with a hard question, but if they felt the question was so easy that the contestant should know the answer without help they would deem him/her to be a blockhead not worthy of help and give the wrong answer;
• In Russia the audience would generally give the wrong answer because Russians generally feel that it is unfair for someone to get rich simply because he/she is lucky enough to be selected as a contestant for a quiz show.

The point is that people in the three countries are all seen to be acting reasonably given their underlying attitudes toward quiz shows. However, they act very differently because those underlying positions are fundamentally different.

This seems to beautifully illustrate a point. A person's culture includes a cluster of underlying attitudes which are acculturated often tacitly by contact with others in the culture. People everywhere act in fairly predictable ways if you know the ideas and attitudes on which they base their actions; in this way, people are pretty much alike in all cultures. On the other hand, since the underlying attitudes differ so much from one culture to another, contingent on the historical development of that culture, people from different cultures can respond very differently to very comparable situations.