Comment by Noughmad

It isn't so much about competitiveness or pettiness, but rather about individualism. Americans for some reason always like to think that everything was invented by a single super-genious individual working alone in a cave with a box of scraps. That's how it's always presented in the media - superheroes (alone or in a very small group), lone scientists, billionaires who single-handedly created their wealth from scratch, etc.