> I tend to call it the bullshit culture because my favorite example is... writing a good paper for class is admired - but what's really praised is writing a paper that gets good marks without ever having read the subject matter.

I don't think this is an American thing. In fact, I've never seen this praised anywhere outside of maybe a few people back in High School.

I worked for a company that expanded rapidly with distributed offices all over the world. One of the growing pains we had was that the managers from certain countries, America included, were very trusting by default. This opened the door to a lot of manipulation from employees in certain other countries (which I'm deliberately not going to name) where getting away with a lie was more or less considered acceptable as long as you weren't caught.