“Personal attributes and uniqueness” are the hallmarks of the American who has taken the less traveled road, whether in a poem or on a podium. After all, no matter what one thinks is the primary meaning of “The Road Not Taken,” it’s hard to miss the fact that there are no other people in it. Even in the closing stanza, when the speaker announces “I shall be telling this,” he never says to whom he’ll be doing the telling. It seems as likely as anything else that he’ll be talking to himself, like an authentic American.

That said, categories like “independent” and “interdependent” are obviously crude tools with which to measure the fine-grained material of the human self, and as such, they should be taken to suggest only very loose general tendencies in societies—the point of cross-cultural psychology isn’t to imply that Americans are from Mars, while the Japanese are from Venus. A person from an East Asian country might be extraordinarily independent, just as an American might be strongly collectively oriented. In addition, someone who is placed in a situation that doesn’t fit the usual circumstances of his culture may quickly take on the assumptions of the new environment. For instance, a study of Korean American students who were spending the summer in Korea indicated that after only five weeks, they were beginning to respond in ways more typical of the surrounding culture (which, unlike American culture, is generally considered to involve an interdependent self-construction). Researchers have even been able to evoke a more independent or interdependent response from bicultural subjects like Chinese Americans simply by showing them well-known icons such as the Statue of Liberty beforehand, or by asking them to respond to questions in Chinese instead of English (a tactic referred to as cultural priming).

Moreover, even within the overarching idea of the extravagantly autonomous American self, there are many shades of individualism. The anthropologist Adrie Kusserow has suggested that the kind of individualism found among lower- and working-class American communities differs sharply from that found in middle-class settings. She characterizes the distinction as “hard” (that is, the self develops strong edges that serve as walls or weapons) versus “soft” (the self is figured as unfolding or flowering) and also notes that these formations can have an offensive or defensive tilt. Her description of the language used by the upper-working-class mothers of a neighborhood in Queens is worth pausing over (emphases mine):

Mothers wove phrases such as “try things out,” “get a lot more out of this world,” “break away,” “go for your dreams,” and “the road less traveled” into their general discourse on the importance of being self-determined, persevering, self-confident, and courageous—really “going for it” because “the sky’s the limit.” For them, progress would not be a delicate process, nor would the parents constantly be there to help the child emerge.