I have not worked in America, but I have worked with Americans so this is hard for me to confirm, but I simply think that weaker work-related laws simply lead to people having on average more fear of losing job and thus there's more internal/social pressure.

Anyway I did travel America though and lived 7 months in Ohio (went to OSU for exchange) and I don't know in which fields do you think where expectations are higher.

Food industry, including fast food in US, has extremely low quality/pressure and expectations. It didn't seem to me like people work harder in that field.

Building/craftsmen too I didn't see any noticeable difference at all, as most of these people are generally self-employed or in very small business anywhere in the world.

People working in shops or supermarkets, again, I haven't seen any noticeable difference.

Thus, I ask, what are those field where expectations are "generally higher"? Dystopic corporate ladder climbing?

Also, I have few colleagues that worked for Facebook, Indeed and Google (specifically Youtube) in Dublin and they recounted that it was American coworkers being consistently late, lazy, and taking every single excuse for class actions and work avoidance (such as getting PTSD or problems over any minor issue).

Also, Europe is a very huge place with different cultures.

I'm speaking of professional white collar jobs. The kind of jobs where you can work independently, nobody is really keeping track of what you're doing and it's not hard to blow off work without causing concern.

I agree that service jobs I don't see much of a difference, but I assume in those jobs you can't really slack off without it being a problem really quick.

Could you make examples? Do you think European bankers work less hard than their american counterparts? Or who does that?

European software engineers? Or is it European lawyers that do less? Or accountants?

It seems to me like you're overgeneralizing.

While I don't doubt that US can have a more competitive nature compared to many countries (in Europe we care much less about status or what other people think about our car and how big is our house, we aren't that insecure) I still think that the scenario you present is just an average where there's more incentives for great performers and low performers to perform better, but the median isn't different at all.

Bankers might not be a good example. US investment banks work their staff notoriously hard to the point of people actually dying on the job from overwork. But, I've repeatedly heard from people who have lived through it, that the work they were doing was largely wasted make-work and the whole thing had a large degree of hazing ritual about it. One guy I talked to had quit and moved to SF to try and join the tech world because he felt the work/life balance was a lot more sane there.

I never talked about Europeans at all, so no, I don't think they work less hard. I said "parts of Asia".