"Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity--yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")"